Generations to come: Future XMRV ongoing costs - Australia

[alex3619]

I just did some rough mathematics on future XMRV costs in Australia. If I use a 10% prevalence rate, I get 2.2 million (I have argued for this percentage elsewhere). If we presume the cost of treatment will be $10,000 per patient, per year, that is a cost of 22 billion per annum for Australia. Of course we can decide not to treat it, and allow the virus to spread.

I do want to, again, make the caveat that XMRV has not been proven to cause any illness. This post is about risks, not proven fact.

If we presume that XMRV is spreading at a rate of 1% per annum, then this cost is increasing by $220,000,000 per annum, as an ongoing cost. That is around $602739 for every day of inaction, added to direct medical costs for generations to come. Every day of inaction is like a minor disaster, every year is a catastrophe.

It has been 485 days since the Lombardi paper. Inaction has therefore increased the eventual annual cost by $292 million dollars. What country can afford to lose that kind of money for generations to come?

Please run the numbers for your country. Feel free to alter the percentages - say 4% infection, or 7%, or a transmission rate of 5%. Whatever numbers you run it is scary - and Australia only has a population of 22,000,000. What is it for Europe or the USA?

 

[SOC]

If we presume the cost of treatment will be $10,000 per patient, per year, that is a cost of 22 billion per annum for Australia. Of course we can decide not to treat it, and allow the virus to spread.

Ha! For my family, the ME/CFS-related medical costs are more like $10,000 per month. Valcyte and travel ain't cheap, boyo.

 

[alex3619]

Hi sickofcfs, I am being conservative, and presuming eventual costs are minimized with more research - you are talking about an order of magnititude increase in costs, its even more scary. Bye, Alex

 

[SOC]

Hi sickofcfs, I am being conservative, and presuming eventual costs are minimized with more research - you are talking about an order of magnititude increase in costs, its even more scary. Bye, Alex

I'm wondering if effective treatment (we are getting better) is going to cost an order of magnitude more than anything we currently gets. Scares me because of fight insurance companies are going to put up.

 

[alex3619]

The insurance companies are bankrupt if this gets out of control. That should scare them more. The only cost effective solution is to develop an XMRV vaccine, which will reduce the infection rate. It will not cure us however, or the nearly billion infected.

 

[illsince1977]

They will twiddle their thumbs and deny, deny, deny in hopes treatment will be cheaper some day. You know the risk/cost ratio scenarios they are mulling over because they think it won't happen to them, Alex!

 

[alex3619]

Hi illsince1977, I hope you are wrong, but I fear you might be right. Certainly their past behaviour indicates that might be the case. However, they are running out of time. I think it likely this will become such a crisis within five to ten years, once the science is obvious, they they will be forced to pay up, and may even go bankrupt, with the investors losing everything. That is where this is heading, and I don't think it can be stopped. Only decisive intervention, now, can have a chance. Those responsible for all the recent economic woes also put it off, and we bailed them out. If a billion people are infected or dying, they wont be bailed out, they will be lynched.

Presuming of course that XMRV is causal.

Bye
Alex

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Alex
good post!
yeah any SANE person would realize that swift massive treatment would save much in future.
major works, because of economy of scale are MUCH cheaper in the long run, be it vaccine or mass produced specific antivirals

ANother serious issue, is that it's likely this virus doens't cause just one illness
see this is the damn problem with the morons who run the medical world (or at least one's who've screwed us over), they are so stupid they jsut see "one pathogen causes one Human disease"
Um, no!!!
XMRV could be causing ME/CFS, autism, aytpical mutiple sclerosis, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and who knows what else.
So it's costs to society as a whole could be astornomical, it maybe a cuase of major portion of Human misery across the globe!

It should be seen as a fantastic chance to go down in history as a great achievement along with eradicating smallpox, public sewerage etc, for causing enormous change to world health.
Instead, we have greedy, cowarldy, myopic muppets who'd soooner cold bloodedly condemn millions ot misery and death, than get off their FAT ARSES AND DO SOMETHING!

 

[alex3619]

Hi SilverbladeTE, its sad that I am in furious agreement with those who are in furious agreement with me. If the world could understand what you and I do, and nearly every ME/CFS patient I have spoken to, the world would be much better off, and the insurance industries of the world would have a future. The way this is going, the only way medical insurance is going to work in twenty years is if run by government. None of the medical insurers will survive - again, if the XMRV research keeps going where it is going. Bye, Alex

 

[markmc20001]

ANother serious issue, is that it's likely this virus doens't cause just one illness
see this is the damn problem with the morons who run the medical world (or at least one's who've screwed us over), they are so stupid they jsut see "one pathogen causes one Human disease"
Um, no!!!
XMRV could be causing ME/CFS, autism, aytpical mutiple sclerosis, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and who knows what else.

We are mostly in agreement, but I would conclude that I am pretty much a moron at this point, and even I can tell that it is likely XRMV causing all these problems. The medical world can read these studies. They WRITE the studies. They are not stupid, and their actions are deliberate, as hard as it is to comprehend.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Alex
from what I have read, it's believed that in 10 to 15 years time, most Americans simply will NOT be able to afford health insurance, ebcause wages have in rela terms, NOT increased since the 1980s for Ordinary Folks.
Folk would be in penury, if not for huge advance sin tehcnology, shipping and use of ultra cheap labour in CHina etc haivng kept prices of goods down.

ie, since 1980s, Working and Lower Middle Class wages have only kept even with inflation etc, in real terms. But, insurance prices are not so linked...