Within the next few weeks the FDA, the US medicines authority, is expected to approve a drug called donanemab. Millions of families are waiting, desperate, because it and lecanemab — also in the queue — are potential breakthroughs in the treatment of Alzheimer’s.
When approved, pressure immediately transfers to the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to follow suit. And then to the NHS to come up with the goods — potentially in 2025.
We have been here before, with Covid vaccines, but 80 years ago there was an even more urgent moment. After the Second World War people were clamouring for streptomycin, a miracle drug that cured pulmonary tuberculosis, then the world’s deadliest disease.
Invented in the US in 1943, the first doses trickled into the UK in 1948. I’ve just read Linda Grant’s novel The Dark Circle, set in a sanatorium where ailing patients lay waiting, yearning for the magic injections to give them their lungs back.
When the drug did arrive, streptomycin was heavily rationed. For me, there is a personal twist to this forgotten slice of medical history. I wouldn’t exist had it not been for streptomycin.
Advertisement
In 1948 my father was very close to death in a London hospital, not from TB but from meningitis. Streptomycin worked for this too, and he was among the first to receive the drug.
Big doses saved his life. But at the time, because of the urgency, no one realised that streptomycin could destroy the middle ear. My father was left with only 12 per cent hearing for the rest of his life.
Tongue-twisters for outsiders give locals a laugh
It would have been amusing, if the situation wasn’t so serious, to hear the national media trying to pronounce Brechin. Breech-in, Bretchin, and eventually they settled on Breek-in. The problem was pronouncing the “ch”. Never mind, let’s hear it for Lock Ness.
No call to be smug, though. There are place names littering the UK which catch out the stranger. Local knowledge makes sneering easy. For a while I lived in a village called Aughton in Lancashire, pronounced Orton. But there’s an Aughton in Cumbria pronounced by the locals, as if they had a serious problem with phlegm, Ochton.
Not far down the road from Aughton in Lancs is Maghull, another bear pit — Mag-hull to outsider, Ma-gull to locals. We used to take childish delight hearing Radio 1 DJs get it wrong.
Rowans hint the end is nigh
Advertisement
None of the rowan trees around here have berries on them this year. I’m not convinced by old wives’ tales about apocalyptic winters to come — I suspect it’s more about a cold late spring – but I do feel sorry for the disconsolate fieldfares and redwings. Large flocks of them have been circling around looking seriously put out.
I have a hybrid rowan tree in my garden with yellow berries, which obviously don’t taste so good. I watched yesterday as a handful of fieldfares vied half-heartedly with a flock of long-tailed tits to possess the tree. Neither lot were convinced. They reminded me of me having to go to Burger King rather than McDonald’s.
Compassion not comparison in hard times
It’s funny how some people’s suffering is always worse than your suffering. Whenever trouble in the Middle East coincides with problems elsewhere, there’s always an outbreak of ludicrous moral sanctimony somewhere online.
Homeless with floods and wet carpets? Get a life. Women and babies are dying in Gaza. Yours is a first-world problem and your plight is nothing compared with the Palestinians.
I resent such intolerance. I can sit, paralysed, and let someone unload lengthy moans about their sciatica. Just as someone with terminal cancer can empathise with another’s broken wrist. It’s called compassion.
