New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection

Whit the zika outbreak I thought, what if we could some how harden(genetics) the mosquito inmune system to fight off zika? (or any other undesirable virus)

Then find a way to replace the native populations with the hardened ones. (For example some kind of selective trap)

Something similar to what is currently done with livestock, which is vaccinated against many posible human patogens.

I think, experimentation with mosquitoes could be more agressive that trying to find a way to cure a human. And you would not eliminate the population which could lead to problems down the road.

This generally goes for all media entities. Similar scrutiny should be applied to all subjects, not just those for which we're experts. It's a common fallacy to take news of unfamiliar subjects at face value, while understanding that there is far more to the stories we know well than that which is contained in one piece of media.

I prefer to think of it as Voltron... but potato potahto.

> If your goal is to make money the optimal path is to manage symptoms but keep customers (i.e. patients) reliant on your treatments, ideally with their life depending on them.

I have no love for the pharmaceutical industry, but that logic is wrong for so many reasons.

1) Corporations on the public stock exchanges aren't constitutionally capable of maximizing profits with such long-term strategies. Stockholders want fat profits _now_, not a trickle of profits over decades. The industry is already high risk.

2) Because all the low-hanging fruit is gone, what big pharmaceuticals care about is stuffing their pipeline full of as many lottery tickets as possible. They don't have the luxury of only focusing on such narrow strategies as you describe; in order to hit the jackpot more often they need to play the field in all its dimensions. This shotgun approach is why we see so much less-than-revolutionary research. If companies only aimed for the stars (i.e. cures for high-profile diseases) all of them would quickly go bankrupt. They want scratch-offs in their pipeline, too, not only the Mega Millions.

3) For serious ailments the sick person isn't the consumer; the healthcare and insurance industries are the consumers. Substitutes are easier to find or develop for management/sustaining therapies, including none at all. And for such therapies, there's less pressure from the sick because such therapies are less high-profile. A possible cure? They'll be beating down their doctors' and insurers' doors.

4) As much as I hate patents, the effective patent life for a treatment is something like 15 years or less. Which means even if you could corner a market (and they sure do try), you only have 15 years maximum to dominate and reap huge profits, not a lifetime. Again, because it's easier to find alternatives and supplements to therapies like you describe, it's important to front-load as much profit as possible.

None of that is to say that there aren't pathological problems with the incentive structures driving the pharmaceutical and health therapy industries. Or that there aren't counter-veiling and counter-counter-veiling forces at play. But cynical, conspiratorial theories are really unhelpful. They're not realistic and ultimately rather fatalistic, I think.

Hepatitis delta is a satellite virus, of which there are many. The virus described in this article doesn't seem to be considered a satellite virus because, presumably because no part of it is replication-competent. It's a single virus that has its genome segments packaged separately.