My 36 yearl old friend died last month from melanoma, had this drug been available she would still be here with her 9 year old son and he would not be an orphan. Its disgraceful that this drug has been witheld when people are fighting for their lives.

Ann
I am so sorry for your loss , and of course her family’s too. So sad that her death could have been prevented. !
The real fact of delaying treatment like this can not be ignored .

Enda Kenny, You are a disgrace! Money can be found to bail out banks that committed grand scale fraud, yet it can’t be found to cure people that are dying! Resign now please! Do your country a favour!

@declan hope you never work as a councillor ,do you not think if you had nothing to lose would you refuse a treatment that just might prolong your life…

I accept your intentions “Gay Pea” but it remains true that medical science provides so few possible treatments that can extend the life of someone diagnosed with malignant melanoma. Malignant Melanoma has a fatal direct effect so side effects, including fatal ones are seen by sufferers as worth the risk when their outcomes are potentially worse. Hope is often the life-force for a cancer-sufferer so even the chance of a “wonder-drug” keeps hope alive.

I make this comment more for the benefit of people who may feel panicked because they do not have access to it. I understand how these drugs work, more than the majority of oncologists, I can promise you that. These are very powerful molecules that play that have unpredictable effects that vary from person to person based on a multitude of factors. The clinical trial data in no way suggests this is a wonder drug, so let’s not let the drug company executives and their “clinical champions” suggest otherwise. It may buy people some months of life but at what cost physically? I understand when people are dying they look for whatever hope is out there, which is why I object to private companies developing and marketing drugs. It’s better not to bullshit people, I don’t peddle false hope, I think it’s much less cruel that than talking about wonder drugs that may be no more wonderful than less expensive therapeutics already out there. People need to educate themselves in these matters so they’re not being manipulated by pharma marketing departments to rush through regulatory approval, to keep a share prices high. I’m sorry if that sounds cynical, but experience has made me so.

Sorry “Gay Pea” your mask may have slipped a little. What exactly are your qualifications in relation to malignant melanoma? What you have just stated suggests that you actually don’t know anything about that form of cancer. Prove me wrong or apologise for commenting out of pure ignorance of the treatment of malignant melanoma. Please don’t fudge this, if you genuinely know what you are talking about, state your specific knowledge about malignant melanoma. Now.

I’m making a serious point from a professional position, if you just wish to be insulting about it then I’ve no interest in perusing a discussion with you – we’ve all lost people to cancers of various cell types so none of us have a monopoly on suffering. Goodnight .

Good one “Gay Pea”. First you know more than “most oncologists” and now say you have a “professional opinion” that you have no interest in “perusing a discussion” with me. You are a disgrace for trolling on a discussion about a serious topic and crapping on about stuff you know nothing about. You claimed to know detailed information about the effectiveness about a specific melanoma drug and it is clear that you don’t have any actual knowledge of the drug in question and just want to have a cut at pharmaceutical companies in general, regardless of the human issues involved. Shame on you, if you have any shame. Never talk the talk until you can walk the walk.

Along with Andrew Telford below, thank you for some common sense. It would be great if the health service had an unlimited budget and every drug an individual wanted, but that simply isn’t the case. I spoke with my aunt who had cancer and does fundraising the other night, and she felt the same way saying she doubted it cost €85,000 to make the drug. If the government can save maybe €20,000 per person on it, that adds up to millions a year less spent on this particular drug which can be used to buy other drugs.

I really hope it stays fine for you so you get to keep your smug economist angle on this. If you ever had malignant melanoma you would understand what a horrible form of cancer it is. Normal cancer treatments are mostly useless and the prognosis for a patient is usually very obvious from the pathology on the initial tumour. Melanoma is different and any possibility of survival would be grabbed by any sufferer.

I agree about the government needing to sort out the issue of cost, but not AFTER people have died. There must be some mechanism where a drug is made available on a pilot basis until there is agreement on the final cost. Your prism is obviously a rose-tinted one and you would really need to wake up and put yourself in the shoes of someone staring death in the face before your pronounce on such matters.

Well said. A valid point. While the government’s galling financial decisions are frustrating – to put it mildly – it must also be acknowledged that pharma derives enormous profits from some of these medicines and it often seems like the more life-threatening the illness, the more zeroes pop up on the price tag.

I don’t agree with Reilly withholding medicines purely because of cost, especially when each one of us is having to dig deeper and deeper into emptier pockets for unsecured bondholders, but let’s also be clear that these companies set the price. They’re not beholden to the IMF and the ECB. Or Merkel. Sarkozy. Geithner.
You’d think with our fairly handy corporate tax rate that they’d do us a favour. €85,000 per course of treatment? I’d do anything for a loved one, of course. But it’s utterly exploitative.

@B Collins, on a patient level, needing to stay alive, the arguments about money rate bottom to everything else. But maybe subjective thinking like that shouldn’t be used to make decisions about important amounts of money and people’s lives. But are objective reasons any better? Does our recent history as a nation show that objective decisions about money have been sound decisions and have resulted in sound social outcomes?

Or maybe decisions dealing with the plight of people dealing with various potentially fatal diseases are necessarily subjective? Maybe that is the way it should be. Live or die? How much? Live a bit longer? How much? Have a better quality of life? How much? Be healthier? How much? Those questions traverse the full range of human experience and I believe that money cannot be the deciding factor in any of them. If it can be, we can legitimately excuse anything.

Sun block CAUSES cancer. I suggest you do some research!

Most of the research on sunscreen fails to establish a statistically significant causal relationship between sunscreen use and melanoma, although incidence does appear higher in some studies.

What the research actually suggests is that moderate sensible exposure to sunshine actually increases the immune systems ability to eliminate malignant cells by stimulating the production of important anti cancer immune cells. The big problem is binging, so the fortnight on a beach Southern Spain after a bleak Irish winter is an issue, likewise people who allow themselves to go lobster red every time the sun comes out are high risk, particularly fair skinned Irish people. The natural cellular defenses become overwhelmed in these situations not having been primed to cope with this kind of UV onslaught – that’s where the problems occur.

Not sure what happened the site but this comment was posted as a reply to the repulsive economic attitude spat out by Andrew Telford above. Go on Andrew, answer my question.

Sunblock doesn’t cause malignant melanoma. Move on to some discussion someplace where you actually do know something about the matter at hand.