There are times that I truly wonder what has happened to some reporters. Medscape reports on the proposed genetic tracking proposal of the Administration, yes that is what it really is, and they state:
Putting his money where his mouth is, President Obama will seek $215
million to finance the Precision Medicine Initiative he first mentioned
in his State of the Union speech on January 20.
Putting whose money! It is NOT his $215 million, it is ours you nimwhit! This is the problem many folks have. The fail to understand the very fundamentals of our economy. They continue:
Putting his money where his mouth is, President Obama will seek $215
million to finance the Precision Medicine Initiative he first mentioned
in his State of the Union speech on January 20.
They continue:
The NIH has been in contact with 200 studies that have at least
10,000 enrollees each, which it hopes to integrate into the overall
cohort, Dr Collins said. Volunteers will be needed to round it out.
The
data will be accessible to qualified researchers and likely also will
be used by pharmaceutical, device, and diagnostic companies, he said. An
early outcome "will be to take this field of pharmacogenomics — the
right drug at the right dose for the right person — and really put it to
the test," Dr Collins said. The FDA has approved more than 100 drugs
with labeling urging DNA testing before use. "And yet it's not being
done because the logistics are all wrong." But with a database
that offers results on a million people, "it's a click of the mouse for
the doctor to figure out whether it's a different drug or a different
dose," he said.
The proposal was in NEJM. It stated:
The concept of precision medicine — prevention and treatment
strategies that take individual variability into account — is not new1;
blood typing, for instance, has been used to guide blood transfusions
for more than a century. But the prospect of applying this concept
broadly has been dramatically improved by the recent development of
large-scale biologic databases (such as the human genome sequence),
powerful methods for characterizing patients (such as proteomics,
metabolomics, genomics, diverse cellular assays, and even mobile health
technology), and computational tools for analyzing large sets of data.
What is needed now is a broad research program to encourage creative
approaches to precision medicine, test them rigorously, and ultimately
use them to build the evidence base needed to guide clinical practice. The
proposed initiative has two main components: a near-term focus on
cancers and a longer-term aim to generate knowledge applicable to the
whole range of health and disease. Both components are now within our
reach because of advances in basic research, including molecular
biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. Furthermore, the initiative taps
into converging trends of increased connectivity, through social media
and mobile devices, and Americans' growing desire to be active partners
in medical research.
It simply is taking all of our personal genetic data and handing it over to the FEDs so they can figure out what is the "best" way they can deal with us.
One should beware. This is a massive intrusion into our lives and the results could be catastrophic. Precision medicine is not personal medicine. It is the development of least cost delivery and the tails be damned. Namely they will deal with the +/- one sigma and the rest may just go by the wayside. Where is Nancy Pelosi when we really need her, she could have made this real clear!