THE MIRACLE OF SALT WATER: Dean Barnett of SoxBlog has Cystic Fibrosis, and has experienced tremendous results with a new treatment that isn’t exactly high-tech. It involves inhaling aerosolized salt water. He writes:

For years good people, the world’s best, have been pouring their hearts, souls and money into finding effective treatments for CF and generally coming up with very little. And all of a sudden, a super-promising new treatment comes along. And it’s salt water!

There’s also the additional minor miracle that being just salt water, the treatment didn’t have to spend the better part of a decade navigating the FDA approval maze before reaching the general CF public that so desperately needs it. If a similarly effective treatment had been a medicine hatched in the labs of Genzyme, the FDA would have kept it out of the hands of the seriously ill people (who would eagerly roll the dice on an experimental treatment) until those seriously ill people had become seriously dead.

As an additional benefit, because it’s just salt water and thus cheap to make, no one will make much money off of it which means the CF community will be spared the ghastly sight of our nation’s Ted Kennedy types demonizing the pharmaceuticals who just pioneered a life-saving treatment for being profit oriented.

In other words, everyone wins!

Read the whole thing, in which he also notes the strange emotional impact of realizing that he might live longer than he had expected.