How to stop viruses with “anti-viral” viral effects
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal discussed the recent troubles of a company, Theranos, in the article, “Walgreens Scrutinizes Theranos Testing.” Although the article discusses issues related with the partnership, within the scope of networks, we will simply discussed their plans and what the implementation of these plans could do. In short, Theranos is self proclaimed a healthcare technology company that strives to provide tests that allow a patient to find out, within seconds, a myriad of things including finding drugs in ones system, establishing someones blood type, even detecting diseases like HIV and Hepatitis. On their company website, they explain that, “We define Theranos as: Detecting the onset of disease in time for therapy to be effective” given that some tests currently produce results in weeks, postponing when a patient could be undergoing treatment. They continue: “So we can begin to build a world where no one finds out too late that something is wrong. And no one has to say goodbye too soon.” Consistent with their mission statement, Theranos has paired with other entities like Walgreens and the Cleveland Clinic to further provide their services to the masses. Their partnership with Walgreens plans to have “wellness centers” inside Walgreens locations where individuals could go and get immediate test results for a large amount of different concerns. With over 8,000 storefronts within the United States, the implementation of this plan could lead to millions of people getting immediate results and subsequent treatment.
Although these services would be phenomenal for individuals looking to find immediate results, for example, in an scare relating to a sexual transmitted disease, this could have an even larger impact in relation to the common good. For the rest of the discussion of this topic, we will discuss the effect of this drug in context of sexual disease spreading prevention. Although current health care providers encourage all individuals to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) after every encounter with a new partner of unknown status, the current hurdles of going to a healthcare provider and waiting for results deter this behavior. Furthermore, the shortest frequency for getting tested that is suggested is every 3 months for non-monogamous patients. With all of these barriers to getting tested, this could leave an individual infected in turn infecting other for a significant amount of time. As we can see, this path of infection can quickly have a viral effect, especially when a significant portion of the population does not amply use protection and these individuals are not knowledgeable of the infection when it is three to four degrees of separation ways. If these health centers generated by Theranos/Walgreens was implemented at even one location, it would provide individuals a cheap and quick method of getting test, persuading the population to get tested more frequently; this frequent testing will quickly quell the viral nature of sexually transmitted diseases in a very large radius. With the number of centers that Walgreens could implement these centers in, the implementation of this would have a positive viral component of distribution out to the masses, further demonstrating their impact.
In conclusion, by providing these cheap and efficient alternatives to testing, this could both stop the viral component of the spread of the disease coupled with the viral component of having these centers at thousands of locations, potentially leading to the end of many commonly seen diseases simply due to network effects. Hopefully Theranos will be able to fix the issues it has related to its products so that they can be launched and begin making a huge network impact.
Sources:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/walgreens-scrutinizes-theranos-testing-1445644015?cb=logged0.2564354855567217
https://www.theranos.com/company