Cystic Fibrosis

“Yet the advances always seemed to be mixed blessings, ushering in new challenges such as antibiotic-resistant organisms or extensive after-transplant health problems. . . . From the outset antibacterial therapy was a balancing act for the clinician  alternating drug regimen in late-70s [cf. TB], and clinical research to regulate use of innovative drugs (Wailoo III, 80-83). From mid-80s, lung transplantation led to further reinvention of CF as a pulmonary disease, since increasingly older (= into young adulthood) patients increasingly died from lung problems, with surgery  further transmutation of CF owing to lifelong posttransplant care: “Having a transplant is a chronic illness” (surgeon Thomas Spray, in Wailoo III, 89). In 90s, on the eve of gene therapy, CF patients “in many respects traded one type of deadly disease for another – one that was manageable, but still deadly” (90). “The idea of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis filled an emotional need, but in the end it was a marketing myth, revealing more about the business culture and mainstream ideologies of the 1990s than about the actual potential of genetic technology” (110).