BioEdge: Is euthanasia the only way out if you can’t afford your medication?

BioEdge: Is euthanasia the only way out if you can’t afford your medication?

Is euthanasia the only way out if you can’t afford your medication? by Michael Cook | 13 Jul 2019 | 1 comment       A Belgian man with a serious degenerative blood disease has told the media that he has applied for euthanasia because he cannot afford the expensive medication he needs to live a normal life. Christophe (no surname was given) has four children, aged 4 to 10, but he separated from his partner two years ago. He is living alone and can no longer work. When his children visit on the weekends, his parents need to accompany them in case he falls or faints. He suffers from a rare disorder, paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, which destroys red blood cells. Patients have a life expectancy of 10 to 20 years from the time of diagnosis. Christophe is constantly fatigued, falls, and suffers from breathlessness and swollen glands. PNH is rare, with an annual rate of 1 to 2 cases per million and there are only two known treatments: a bone marrow transplant and a drug called Eculizumab (or Soliris) which costs US$500,000 annually. None of Christophe’s relatives are a good match for a transplant and he cannot afford Eculizumab, even with help of Belgium’s healthcare system. He began thinking about euthanasia three years ago. A year ago, he started doing the paperwork. "I sleep all the time, that's why I'm waiting for euthanasia, I'm waiting for the answer ... because if I can only live like this ... like a vegetable," he told the Belgian outlet RTL.  Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

Michel Houellebecq and Pope Francis are two names seldom found in the same sentence. Yet they are united in decrying the death of Vincent Lambert, the disabled French nurse who died this week after having his food and water removed.

Being the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis’s views are, and are supposed to be, predictable. But Houellebecq, France’s most acclaimed and controversial novelist, is hardly a spokesman for traditional values. His novels are grotesque, nihilistic, pornographic, vulgar, cynical, and misogynistic. But, with the unsparing honesty of a true artist, he sees exactly what was going on:

"Vincent Lambert was in no way prey to unbearable suffering, he was not suffering any pain at all (...) He was not even at the end of life. He lived in a particular mental state, the most honest of which would be to say that we know almost nothing …

As he points out, it is ironic that France’s minister for health is called the “Minister of Health and Solidarity”. Solidarity with whom?

 

Michael Cook Editor BioEdge

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