This is fantastic news for all patients needing this life-enhancing medication... let's hope the Ministry of Health and Pharmac can now get this "miracle drug" across the line and give patients and their families an aspect of certainty!
- Keith T
If this medicine adds 27 years to someone's life, saves us some medical costs and enables someone with CF to live a full life and kept out of hospital then it makes logical sense to fund Trikafta. $60m is a tiny amount of money in the scheme of things if one was to factor in the true, wider cost of not funding Trikafta.
- Edward L
They need $60m which is slightly more than they poured down the gurgler on the cycle bridge to nowhere... OK, cough it up then.
- Craig M
I 100 per cent support this "miracle" drug being available to New Zealanders. Cystic fibrosis is a terrible disease and the only hope a sufferer has of surviving this condition is often by having a lung transplant - if a donor can be found in time. Even then the disease starts ruining the donor lungs. Give them the drug and let them have the best opportunity for life. We spend millions on self-inflicted illnesses (obesity, alcoholism, drugs, smoking, melanoma etc) so providing this drug gets my vote... not that it matters!
- Brendon W
A terrible genetic disease (which is why there is no cure like there is no cure for having blue eyes) but so expensive - I would vote for it if it was a cure but it isn't, you have to take it every year for the rest of your life at $300,000 a year (x 500 people makes it possibly beyond our ability to fund) = $15 million a year every year on this one disease. Sadly we just cannot fund every medical treatment - and no country can.
- John H
In reply to John H:
Hi John. This is actually incorrect. You are quoting a list price for a drug rather than the confidential price reduction. You are also not factoring in the cost savings to the system. If one could be kept well enough to work and pay taxes rather than be stuck in and out of hospital and claiming a benefit, then it might become cost neutral.
You also need to factor in the fact that it will eventually come off patent, which would lower the price significantly. So the cost isn't for life.
- Edward L
In reply to John H:
I am very glad that the decision is not yours to make, it may not be a cure but it is a treatment that allows many people to live a near-normal life (and reduce the burden on the decaying health system). CF is a surprisingly common genetic disease, one in 29 people carry the gene, with about one in 3200 live births being affected.
Why would you even think that a treatment for a very cruel disease, that affects mostly the young - since CF sufferers have a shortened life expectancy - should not be funded like it is in Australia and many other countries?
Fortunately, science is producing more and more treatments and cures (genetic therapy) for genetic conditions. These cures/treatments will eventually become more mainstream, cost-effective and should not be denied to the afflicted. As Brendon W commented: we spend millions (probably nearer billions) on self-inflicted illness, those afflicted by genetic diseases did not cause their disease, surely they deserve the treatments available?
- Kirstie K
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