
FDA approves Theranos test for HSV-1 - pak
http://fortune.com/2015/07/02/theranos-fda-approval/
======
minthd
One guess I have about theranos , is that they are going to radically change
healthcare in Africa. Why ?

Well let's start with the fact that the main thing preventing labs-on-chip
devices transforming Africa today is business reasons - its just not seen as a
good investment by western companies.

But what's unique about theranos is that it is owned by Holmes ,which seems
very idealistic(as her main motivation here ) , and her father worked for
years helping African healthcare .

So I think Holmes will use the strong business it will build in the west to
create and extremely low cost African healthcare .That also explains why she
has advisors like foreign state secretary and why bill gates is very impressed
with her.

~~~
fsloth
Yeah, I suppose commodisation of services has the advantage that the benefits
tricle down easier to developing economies as boxed solutions require less
infrastructure and human capital. Everybody wins.

~~~
minthd
I think it's more than commodification. My guess is that price in the west
would be much higher than in africa(where products will be sold at cost) - but
still relatively low, mainly because investors want profits. And whole in
whole it's the moral thing to do, especially with the fact the healthcare
quality in the west will increase.

As a general note, i've seen research talking about prices of 0.01 CENTS PER
TEST for some lab-ob-a-chip methods.

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legulere
The biggest problem with mass testing are the false positives. When you're
testing 100 million people even a low false positive rate of 0.1% will still
mean that 100 000 people will think they're sick when they're not. I once even
saw an example where they calculated that when everybody did an HIV test most
positives actually would be false positives.

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lvs
All that hype for a microfluidic sandwich ELISA?

~~~
hanklazard
Agreed. I was expecting something revolutionary in the report linked from the
article. I'm pretty shocked that a technique from the 1970's is only now
"disrupting" the medical laboratory industry. I'm not saying that this isn't
impressive, just that it seems it should have been done a long time ago!

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melling
I didn't realize that Walgreens is already doing Theranos tests.

[http://www.walgreens.com/storelocator/find.jsp](http://www.walgreens.com/storelocator/find.jsp)

What tests do they perform? Is this something that we should be doing yearly?

[update] fixed typo

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mark212
Walgreens and Walmart are two different companies, despite the similarity of
their names.

Walgreens had $76b in revenues last year and was founded in 1901. Walmart
wasn't founded until 1962, but had $485b in revenue.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walgreens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walgreens)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart)

~~~
melling
Fixed the typo. I know the difference. I walk by Walgreens daily, but never
shop there.

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personjerry
What the heck, I posted this exact same link like 12 hours ago.

~~~
x5n1
Entrepreneurs know not to bitch like this. Not only the idea is important,
timing is important. The market was not ready for your idea 12 hours ago. Also
luck plays a role. The right people did not see your post at the right time to
upvote it.

~~~
kzhahou
I'd love to see a postmortem of why the original post failed. It would be
useful for future posters. Honestly, we've all been there, even though you
always feel like you have to tell people you're "killin' it!" with your HN
submissions.

~~~
pmelendez
There was a discussion about the best timing to post on HN a couple of years
ago :

[http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-
hacker-...](http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757790)

And also who said it was irrelevant:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040)

[http://antontarasenko.com/2015/04/23/best-time-to-post-
its-i...](http://antontarasenko.com/2015/04/23/best-time-to-post-its-
irrelevant/)

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mordrax
I started reading this article and ended up reading Meditations by Marcus
Aurelius... totally forgot about the original article

