Articles

Introduction A disease that has not been adopted by the pharmaceutical industry because it provides little financial incentive for the private sector to make and market new medications to treat or prevent it.  An orphan disease may be a rare disease or a common disease that has been ignored because it is far more prevalent in developing countries than in the developed world. A rare disease is defined by the European Union as one that affects less than 5 in 10,000 of the general population. There are thousands of rare diseases. To date, six to seven thousand rare diseases have been discovered and new diseases are regularly described in medical literature. 7% of the popu...