to tell me about a drug that will cure the common cold. The reason the FDA won't approve it is disturbing. From the Touchstone Magazine website.
Infobeat News reports that the FDA has rejected a medicine, called Picovir, that will cure the common cold. Americans, it says, suffer one billion colds each year. Why would the FDA reject a medicine that will make nearly every American feel a lot better, keep people working untold thousands of days, make social contact much less, um, sticky, and keep millions of children in school? The FDA says that "the drug's potential side effects . . . make it unacceptable to treat what is mostly a nuisance illness rather than a serious medical condition." Does it cause cancer, hurt the heart, ruin the kidneys, what? Reports the story: "Most notabl[e]" of the side effects is . . .Wait for it.
You're not going to believe this.
Really.
"cutting the effectiveness of birth control pills."
Because some women with a cold might not pay attention to the warning label, the rest of us -- all 200 million-some of us -- have to sniffle and snort and ache and lay in bed feeling awful when we could be doing something useful. It is more important to the FDA to ensure that some people can have sex without having babies than to let everyone else feel a lot better and do a lot more. We live in a very strange world.
