You dismissed vaccines earlier, since can be covered under patent. But Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine. In the mid-20th century, polio was killing more American children than any other communicable disease. Now it's nearly eradicated.

Just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk . It brought tears to my eyes. "By the time Thomas Francis stepped down from the podium, church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping." "It was as if a war had ended."

I'm sure companies could have made more profit selling tens of thousands of iron lungs a year. I refuse to believe that sort of profit was a serious consideration.

Something more prosaic - cavities are greatly reduced with fluoride treatment. Fluoridated water and/or toothpastes have greatly reduced dental bills.

And I can't stress this enough: research consistently shows that exercise is healthy, eating fruits and vegetables is healthy, and that cigarettes are not healthy. There's almost no cost to these and there's no patent coverage at all.

If you want something more disease like, then again I point to stomach ulcers. Most are caused by H. pylori infection, and the first treatment was a standard antibiotic, which was off-patent by the time the bacteria link was discovered.

Or cholera. The best treatment for that is oral rehydration therapy, which in general "saves millions of children a year from death due to diarrhea - the second leading cause of death in children under five." In the home-made version, "1 liter of boiled water, 1 teaspoon of salt, 8 teaspoons of sugar, and added mashed banana for potassium and to improve taste." People get better faster with antibiotics, but they will recover so long as they are sufficiently hydrated. Simple, but people in the 1800s didn't know this and sometimes it killed up to 2/3rds of the people on the wagon trails out to the US West.

This simple treatment didn't receive world-wide recognition until the 1970s, based on fundamental research done in the 1960s. (There were people who prescribed this sort of treatment earlier, but without enough studies to be persuasive, nor with physical explanations of why it should be effective.) But with it the mortality rate is under 1%, instead of 50%.

The best cure, btw, is prevention via improved water treatment. That has nothing to do with pharmaceutical companies.

Your view of the patent system, pharmaceutical development, and the people who work in them is woefully simplistic. If I worked for a company and found that the cure for malaria/cancer/whatever was to eat an orange every day then there's a huge personal incentive for me to publish. For one, that would likely lead to a Nobel Prize. Remember also that most of the people doing drug research got into the field because they want to cure or at least treat disease. They think that drugs or vaccines are the most likely solution, but that's a means, not an end. Do you really think that if a researcher found a non-drug solution that they would be able to stay quiet?

Or like I said earlier - drug discovery researchers and their friends and family come down with the same diseases as others in their community. Why would someone want to "suppress" information which would lead to their parents being treated for Alzheimer's, even if it isn't a drug treatment. Or do you really think people working for pharmaceutical companies are so amoral and concerned with the bottom line?

For that matter, look at organizations like the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases. It's co-sponsored by the drug company Novartis, which has said it "will seek to make treatments developed by the NITD available without profit to the poor in developing nations in which these diseases are endemic."

I am not saying the drug companies are pure of heart. There's strong economic incentives to find medicines which can treat heart disease, for example, in part because people don't exercise, don't eat the right foods, and continue to smoke. Given two diseases they are more likely to go after the first world disease, where there's more money to be made, than a third world disease, where there isn't. But the people who make up the drug companies are human, and want to help other people.

Your argument about fiscal responsibility is a nearly worthless concept. Consider that I am a CEO of a large company and I've said that we would contribute $10 million to charity during the year. A shareholder might sue me for irresponsibility. But that might be what's needed to keep me as head of the company. Or it might be justified as improving morale, since its employees feel better about how their work helps others. Or it might be good advertising and improve the company's market image. Your statement assumes that immediate short-term money is and should be the only concern in a company and that's simply not the case, else no US company would ever donate money to charity.

Or as another example, do you think it's fiscally responsible for Oracle to contribute money to Oracle Racing, which funds Larry Ellison's sailboat racing interests?

Lastly, there are a lot of diseases in the world. Most attempts at a cure fail. Most pharmaceutical researchers fail to discover even one drug in a career. Finding a non-pharmaceutical cure would, for the books, count as just another failure. The odds of finding a non-pharmaceutical cure between the time that a lot of money has been spent on finding a pharmaceutical one and the time that it would have made most of its revenue, is small. It's much more likely that another pharmaceutical company will introduce their own drug for the same market during that time. Seriously, by the time someone's spent $100 million on a drug (so about 20% of the way to market), there's been a huge amount of research on the disease, other forms of treatments, the drug pathway, and so on, including research outside of the company. The case you talked about is so unlikely that I can't see anyone making a decision based on that possibility.

Now your homework is to read the Wikipedia pages for cholera, polio, Jonas Salk, smallpox, typhoid, penicillin and Albert Alexander, and Helicobacter pylori and Robin Warren.