Or, if you think like a public health specialist, you could claim that my mother was treating the "disease" of thumb-sucking with a medicine designed especially for that purpose. And if thumb-sucking is something bad that happens to little boys, not something that little boys do because they like it, how could there be any objection to using a safe, effective cure?
Public health specialists routinely describe another "bad" behavior, tobacco use, not just as a risk factor for disease but as a disease in itself. They call smoking a "tobacco-use disorder"; writ large, it is "the man-made plague" (as the epidemiologist R. T. Ravenholt puts it) or "The Global Tobacco Epidemic" (the title of a 1995 article in Scientific American). The development of so-called nicotine vaccines, which are being tested by at least three companies in the U.S. and the U.K. (with Florida-based Nabi Biopharmaceuticals due to announce its highly anticipated Phase II trial results this fall),
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fits neatly into this paradigm.
By stimulating the immune system to produce antibodies that bind with nicotine, the vaccines render the offending molecule too large to pass the blood-brain barrier, thereby neutralizing its psychoactive effects. In 1999, Alan Leshner, then director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, explained the theory underlying this approach to smoking cessation in a press release about early, NIDA-funded testing of Nabi's product, known as NicVAX.
"A nicotine vaccine may be useful for preventing and treating tobacco addiction, because vaccinated persons would not be able to get a 'kick' from the nicotine in tobacco smoke or chewing tobacco," he said. "Since they would find tobacco less rewarding, they would be less likely to continue using it."
This idea has a certain plausibility, but there are a few caveats.In tests on rats...»»
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The Next Fix
