[Alex3917]

> Health interventions - from clean food and water to drugs and surgery - have improved and lengthened the lives of billions over the last century.

Public health interventions, such as clean water and vaccines, have lengthened life expectancy. Drugs haven't made much of an impact though.

[randcraw]

Wow. Such a bold indefensible statement. By any chance, are you running for President?

Children with infections might beg to differ with you. Or people with hypertension. Or coronary disease. Or HIV. Or diabetes. Or organ transplants. The lives of many millions like these added decades due to drugs.

The impact of vaccines on increasing life expectancy is simply staggering, and vaccines are virtually indistinguishable from biologic drugs.

Literally BILLIONS of people live for decades longer and better because of drugs.

[Alex3917]

> Wow. Such a bold indefensible statement. By any chance, are you running for President? [...] Literally BILLIONS of people live for decades longer and better because of drugs.

Too dumb to use Google?:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8007898

[NoPiece]

Antibiotics?

[ajross]

And vaccines. Those two alone account for some huge chunk of our wins against death. The upthread posters are making a sorta valid point: the low hanging fruit has been picked, and recent innovations are more incremental. And that's true enough, though I agree that cynicism isn't the right response.

[randcraw]

Statins are only about 20 years old. As are hypertensive drugs. Both have had clear impacts on longevity.

Can we be so sure that the next generation of superdrug won't give rise to a comparable revolution in reducing risk? I'm not, and I work in the pharma industry.

True, I'm not especially upbeat about the prospects of jobs here or the survival of individual pharma companies (oft mismanaged, IMO). But I do believe major innovations are on the horizon and may have major impacts, bigger than the aforementioned statins.

Gene therapy, pluripotent cell line therapy, immune system driven therapy -- these all have stunning potential on a wide range of targets. Yes, the future of traditional small molecule drugs is cloudy. But the next generation of genomics and biologics may blow your socks off.

[Alex3917]

Well the question is whether drugs overall improve people's life expectancy, not whether some specific class of drug can lengthen people's lives. Some drugs make people live longer, but other drugs decrease life expectancy.

And even with antibiotics in specific, they save lives, but they also kill among the most people of any class of drug. They're a clear win if you're a burn victim or something, but most situations that are less acute either go away on their own or else were treated successfully with plant-based antibiotics. Despite what the pharma industry would have you believe, there's no law of the universe that decrees that fungi-based antiobiotics should be inherently more effective that plant-based antibiotics, the main reason the former are used today is just that they're less expensive to mass produce.

[zizzles]

Further proves my point: Antibiotic resistance. 300 million projected to be dead by 2050.

Tit for tat.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/antimicrobial-resistance...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/11/antibiotics-...

Although, why is my above post getting downvoted? Too cynical? I'm sorry. Next time I'll lie and say pharmaceutical industry is doing a splendid job and mother nature has taken second place and nobody is getting dementia from prostate medication.

Clearly, life is just roses and daisies here on HN.

[inimino]

Antibiotic resistance is a problem because antibiotics may not save as many lives in the future as they have in the past. That's not what "tit for tat" means. But it seems you've made up your mind already.

[maverick_iceman]

Ever heard of Penicillin?