Deo Debattista, Parliamentary Secretary for Consumer Rights and for the Medicines Authority, quite rightly highlights stem cell technology as the regenerative future medicine. Unfortunately, this is several years away from becoming mainstream medical therapy for serious, debilitating and presently incurable diseases.

Bone marrow transplantation, which he mentions, has been a major advance but, if I’m not mistaken, is not yet practised here in spite of his glowing description of the local scene. In various centres overseas, the race is on to get any adult tissue stem cell (say from your mouth) to develop into any other tissue, obviating the need to use embryonal stem cells and avoiding the potential problem of foreign tissue rejection. However, when fully developed for routine use, one would need to see how available to the sick masses these stem cell technologies will be.

A big ethical problem of modern medicine is that new treatments tend to be expensive and cannot be made available to all that need them (medical rationing). No wonder that we have statistics from various countries showing how the rich tend to live longer than the poor. Dr Debattista happens to be the right person to quote him at least two simple examples of how our health system castigates the less well off. 

The first one is blood-thinning medicine. What is available free is warfarin, requiring regular blood checks and advice not to consume green vegetables (not good for your health). The newer expensive blood-thinning drugs, requiring no regular blood checks and no vegetable exclusion diet, are still not locally available free.  The second example is that some medicines in Malta are priced around three times their cost in Italy, Spain or France. 

Dr Debattista could direct his energies towards such longstanding practices punishing the less well off. There is currently a lot of talk about poor pensioners – will it remain just talk?