(no subject)
Ahh, the festive season is upon us once more. Yes, wrap up warm in aprons and latex gloves, lay out the panic-button parcels round the vat-grown tree, and vaccinate the carol singers. It's New Drug Day!
I've been taking DNAse since before the dawn of the internet, so won't have rabbitted on about it much despite its amazing medical prowess. Technically called Dornase Alpha, before the marketting boys got their hands on it, it's a highly purified form of human deoxyribonuclease produced, just to make sure you're paying attention, in the ovary cells of Chinese hamsters. Yes that bit really is true. The result is an enzyme which, as any fule who's read the wikipedia page kno, catalyzes the hydrolytic cleavage of phosphodiester linkages in the DNA backbone, thereby making me better, hurray.
It doesn't work very well, but you don't like to moan, do you? Well, you do, you positively thrive on it, but that's 'cos you're either the Great British Public or a Lot of Dirty Foreigners, some combining the two by being from the North. Speaking as the great pasty face of the mimsy middle classes, it's my job to be frail and stoic and keep taking the tablets, or in this case nebulising the respules, without recourse to whining.
So imagine my surprise - go on, imagine it, right now - when I found out they've come up with a sequel. DNAse II! Just when you thought it was safe not to feel particularly better at any point.... Only it's not called DNAse II, because that's some other thing apparently, bloody chemistry, it's called Hypertonic Saline, lovely name, very futuristic, very Star Trek, you can practically taste the science, and what's more -
...Hang on. Hypertonic saline? Hypertonicity is just a statement of relative osmotic pressure, isn't it? (As any wikipedian kno.) And... saline? That's just salt water. So hypertonic saline would be... really salty water.
Yes. Yes it is.
So, New Drug Day: inhale some seawater. (Actually it's twice as salty as ordinary seawater, which isn't a boast you see on a lot of viagraspam.) They call it a Drug Challenge in order to make it sound exciting: actually you just inhale it while they watch you, and the challenge is not to be allergic to it. Unsurprisingly, given that it's salt water (albeit very salty water), I'm not.
First impressions though. It tastes like you're inhaling salt, kind of like when you do something dumb like accidentally breathe in underwater, or try to snort a whale, or go water-skiiing. I have to drink like a bastard afterwards to get rid of the salty taste; a situation which I dare say suggests its own filthy dirty punchlines to you, you deviant reprobates, but I just think it would make a good barsnack. And only marginally later impressions: it all but immediately thins my sputum (eww, he said sputum), makes me cough like an old man (eww, he said coughing) and lets me clear my chest in a matter of minutes (aww, he missed out on a blowjob gag just now).
Embarrassingly for all concerned, it appears to work. I don't really know what to say. (The marketting boys are thinking H-2-Woah!) If it turns out, as it does appear to be so turning, that seawater is better for treating me than human deoxyribonuclease (£7200 a year, fiscal fact fans), with its nepotistic phosphodiester linkages, and its clearly padded hydrolytic cleavage, where does that leave me?
The NHS looks stupid, but then it always does, and at least it's onto a massive budgetary saving, which is no bad thing in these difficult times (thanks, Little Book of Journalist Cliches!). But me? I lose out on my oh-so-elitist illness with its oh-so-expensive drugs, and find myself down in the gutter with the rest of you general practitioner plebs, begging for anything more exotic than an aspirin, and breathing seawater like a common walrus. (That bit might require further research, I'm not sure if they've got gills. Any fule will check.)
Anyway, the point is, New Drug Day died for me today. I've grown up, in a way. I can see past the "Barrier nursing" bunting and the tawdry "Do Not Resuscitate" tinsel; all the shameless lack of commercialism that's ruined new drug day for all of us. There's a gazillion chinese hamster whores out of a job now, have you thought of that? Honestly, 'very salty water', I ask you. Whatever happened to expensive new gene therapies, and the increasingly implausible acronyms; the ever-growing lists of side effects and the NHS budget straining at the edges? That's the real meaning of New Drug Day.
Next thing you'll be telling me there's no such thing as swine flu.
I've been taking DNAse since before the dawn of the internet, so won't have rabbitted on about it much despite its amazing medical prowess. Technically called Dornase Alpha, before the marketting boys got their hands on it, it's a highly purified form of human deoxyribonuclease produced, just to make sure you're paying attention, in the ovary cells of Chinese hamsters. Yes that bit really is true. The result is an enzyme which, as any fule who's read the wikipedia page kno, catalyzes the hydrolytic cleavage of phosphodiester linkages in the DNA backbone, thereby making me better, hurray.
It doesn't work very well, but you don't like to moan, do you? Well, you do, you positively thrive on it, but that's 'cos you're either the Great British Public or a Lot of Dirty Foreigners, some combining the two by being from the North. Speaking as the great pasty face of the mimsy middle classes, it's my job to be frail and stoic and keep taking the tablets, or in this case nebulising the respules, without recourse to whining.
So imagine my surprise - go on, imagine it, right now - when I found out they've come up with a sequel. DNAse II! Just when you thought it was safe not to feel particularly better at any point.... Only it's not called DNAse II, because that's some other thing apparently, bloody chemistry, it's called Hypertonic Saline, lovely name, very futuristic, very Star Trek, you can practically taste the science, and what's more -
...Hang on. Hypertonic saline? Hypertonicity is just a statement of relative osmotic pressure, isn't it? (As any wikipedian kno.) And... saline? That's just salt water. So hypertonic saline would be... really salty water.
Yes. Yes it is.
So, New Drug Day: inhale some seawater. (Actually it's twice as salty as ordinary seawater, which isn't a boast you see on a lot of viagraspam.) They call it a Drug Challenge in order to make it sound exciting: actually you just inhale it while they watch you, and the challenge is not to be allergic to it. Unsurprisingly, given that it's salt water (albeit very salty water), I'm not.
First impressions though. It tastes like you're inhaling salt, kind of like when you do something dumb like accidentally breathe in underwater, or try to snort a whale, or go water-skiiing. I have to drink like a bastard afterwards to get rid of the salty taste; a situation which I dare say suggests its own filthy dirty punchlines to you, you deviant reprobates, but I just think it would make a good barsnack. And only marginally later impressions: it all but immediately thins my sputum (eww, he said sputum), makes me cough like an old man (eww, he said coughing) and lets me clear my chest in a matter of minutes (aww, he missed out on a blowjob gag just now).
Embarrassingly for all concerned, it appears to work. I don't really know what to say. (The marketting boys are thinking H-2-Woah!) If it turns out, as it does appear to be so turning, that seawater is better for treating me than human deoxyribonuclease (£7200 a year, fiscal fact fans), with its nepotistic phosphodiester linkages, and its clearly padded hydrolytic cleavage, where does that leave me?
The NHS looks stupid, but then it always does, and at least it's onto a massive budgetary saving, which is no bad thing in these difficult times (thanks, Little Book of Journalist Cliches!). But me? I lose out on my oh-so-elitist illness with its oh-so-expensive drugs, and find myself down in the gutter with the rest of you general practitioner plebs, begging for anything more exotic than an aspirin, and breathing seawater like a common walrus. (That bit might require further research, I'm not sure if they've got gills. Any fule will check.)
Anyway, the point is, New Drug Day died for me today. I've grown up, in a way. I can see past the "Barrier nursing" bunting and the tawdry "Do Not Resuscitate" tinsel; all the shameless lack of commercialism that's ruined new drug day for all of us. There's a gazillion chinese hamster whores out of a job now, have you thought of that? Honestly, 'very salty water', I ask you. Whatever happened to expensive new gene therapies, and the increasingly implausible acronyms; the ever-growing lists of side effects and the NHS budget straining at the edges? That's the real meaning of New Drug Day.
Next thing you'll be telling me there's no such thing as swine flu.