[dawn53]

I guess you have a point, but they never seem to make headway on diseases like MS, new meds, but new meds like Tysabri carry a known risk of PML (which can turn your brain to mush) and Gilenya (which can kill your immune system.) I stick with an interferon, which has about a 33 percent effectiveness rate of lowering relapses (not great considering the med costs 3 grand a month.)

I don’t know, I’ve found “comfort” in figuring lack of progress was because MS was an “orphan” disease, so to speak, not large numbers with the disease, therefore, the financial advantage to pharmaceuticals (considering they still make a lot of money on not curing the disease but on the treatments) would not warrant their investment in a cure.

On the other hand, on a moral basis (which I know is a joke when speaking of pharmaceuticals), there are a lot of diseases that are not brought about by someone’s “behavior”...MS being one of them, along with ALS, MD, Lupus, etc. and it’s hard not to resent the fact that HIV, in a short span, has gone from killer disease and almost certain death to “minor infection” (if this research is true.)

[Oceander]

Understood, and I do apologize if anything I've said is at all hurtful. Perhaps the slight sliver of a silver lining might be that, if HIV can shortly be turned into a "minor infection" then there is no longer any justification for continuing to throw so much money and research resources at it, which should free up some of those resources to focus more on MS.

Quite frankly, I would have thought that a disease like MS would be the more challenging foe to work on for a research scientist, since HIV is, at bottom, really just a virus, albeit a rather fancy one, and we do have a fairly good grounding in dealing with a lot of virii.