Woman's death calls gene therapy into question

The next time some moron talks about medical treatments for the non-medical problems of overweight and obesity or mentions gene therapy, think about this:

"A few hours before she died this summer at the age of 36, Jolee Mohr lay in a Chicago hospital so swollen by internal bleeding and her failing kidneys that her husband decided against bringing their 5-year-old daughter to say goodbye. The girl wouldn’t have recognized her mother.

Robb Mohr couldn’t bring himself to watch her die and he spent his wife’s last hours talking with her helpless and puzzled doctors. One vowed to get to the bottom of the illness...

...Jolee Mohr fell ill the day after her right knee was injected with trillions of genetically engineered viruses in a voluntary experiment to find out if gene therapy might be a safe way to ease the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. She was dead three weeks later."

Oops.

Here is what a good, caring, compassionate doctor has to say about the matter:

"Dr. Theodore Friedmann, who once headed the NIH committee that oversees gene therapy experiments, said developments in medicine often come with problems, even death.

Even if gene therapy is found to be the cause of Jolee Mohr’s death, Friedmann said, the method remains promising.

'There’s no question that this event is tragic for the family and the woman involved,' he said. 'It does simply point to the fact that we have a lot more to learn.'”

At the expense of your life. All because you eat more Calories than you burn.

Then there is this:

"There have been more than 800 gene therapy studies involving 5,000 U.S. patients since the NIH approved the nation’s first human gene transfer study in 1989. Yet there are no approved therapies despite 17 years of research, and the only major success — a cure for the rare inherited immune disorder known as 'bubble boy disease' — came with a high cost: leukemia linked in 2003 to the virus that delivered the treatment."

Don't forget the poor sick care workers who apparently got PTSD from the affair. They were "bothered."

“'The human side to this is awful — it bothered everybody on the team,' Hogarth said. 'We’ve all unfortunately been around it, but this one just seemed even sadder, because she didn’t have a life-threatening illness to begin with.'”

Of course, it you are older, it is okay if you die since it won't cause any gene therapy sick care worker PTSD from witnessing something "really bothersome."

“'To see someone who is otherwise young and otherwise healthy — that I think is the part that is really bothersome,'” he said.

Just a suggestion.

You might want to either think twice before you stuff your pie-hole or die like stink in some gene therapy experiment.