Six years ago I published a paper showing it was possible to reverse diabetic and hypertensive kidney failure if caught early. It was the result of work begun nearly 20 years before. So far, the dialysis and transplantation industry in the US and Europe has suppressed the news . How, you might ask, is this possible?

Newspaper reporters at every level, from my local newspaper right up to the science and medical reporters for the New York Times , refused to take my word for it. Having been fooled repeatedly, the media has become ultra-sceptical. They refuse to be taken in ever again. They’ll only report what everybody already agrees is true. Apparently they’ve abdicated the ‘news.’ They’ll never be the first to break any story. They’ll leave that to the rumor mill, I guess.

All the US media I contacted - newspapers, radio, and TV – insisted on an endorsement from a recognised authority in the renal community before they’d touch the article. Professionally, they were asking people to slit their own throat.

kidney dialysis treatment 150109 02 I asked everybody in the renal community, including non-profit professional organisations like the American and the International Societies of Nephrology, patient help organisations like the American Kidney Fund, non-profit research organisations like the National Kidney Foundation, academic nephrology divisions at first-tier medical schools like Harvard and Washington Universities, and my friends in private practice.

I also asked kidney transplantation organisations - you know how transplant societies are always begging for more kidneys because100,000 people go on dialysis in the US, but there are only 25,000 kidneys for them.

I asked health insurance companies and reinsurance companies. Dialysis is the No 1 cost to reinsurance companies. Since they're all what's called in the business ‘pass-throughs’, ie, they pass costs through to the client by raising premiums, nobody wanted to cut costs, since they'd be cutting their revenues. Health plans with ‘captive’ patients acted no differently than health plans with high turnover.

Nobody wanted to cut revenues from dialysis. After all, each dialysis patient brings in US$100,000 a year during the few years that they're alive. And when a dialysis patient dies, they're replaced by two more. There's a global epidemic of dialysis patients that's getting worse as the population ages.

I also asked the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK, part of the National Institutes of Health), Medicare, which since 1973 has been the single-payer for dialysis, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). They were all no help, even though the NIDDK funds a National Kidney Disease Education Program (NKDEP) which would be perfect for getting the word out to diabetics and hypertensives with early kidney failure.

Nobody wants to lose their job

When they bothered to reply, they said no in different ways. The American Diabetes Association, which co-funded the key research in my lab, along with the Missouri Kidney Programme, said they couldn’t endorse a for-profit company. Lots of non-profit agencies said that, including the NKF and the NIDDK, as if the very act of mentioning a for-profit company jeopardised their 501 (c) 3 status.

But it seems disingenuous, to say the least, for organisations collecting US taxpayers' money, like the ADA, the NKF, and the NIDDK, to stay quiet about a cure that US taxpayers are paying them to find.

My favorite response came from an obviously upper-class woman in England who had started a kidney charity. She was kind enough to write me a handwritten note. No, she told me, she didn’t ‘get involved in that sort of thing’ when I asked her to help me publicise my cure for 90% of kidney failure, even though her charity raises money to find a cure for kidney failure. What was she involved in, then?

kidney dialysis treatment 150109 01 Everybody, it seems, has learned the lesson of the March of Dimes, which is only a shadow of its former self after defeating polio 60 years ago. Nobody wants to remove their raison d’etre. Nobody getting paid to treat or defeat kidney failure, in either the for-profit or non-profit sector, wants to lose their job.

All anybody had to say, anyway, was that my article had been published in a respectable, peer- reviewed scientific journal, which is patently true. Publication in such a journal is sufficient to validate it. Nobody had to say what they thought of the article, or whether they personally believed it. The editors of the journal believed it, after doing their due diligence. In science, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is all it takes for the paper to be considered real.

Of course, any claim of a cure has to be replicated. But if nobody hears from the regular media that a cure has been found, how are they going to know to replicate it? Scientists get their news just like everybody else - from the regular media.

With well over 30,000 medical journals, and new ones appearing every day, it’s humanly impossible to read every one. To expect one article in a single journal to be picked up by the scientific community worldwide is like expecting Gregor Mendel’s experiments on peas to become widely known at the time of publication. They had to be rediscovered 35 years later.

Developing world may benefit first

The tragedy, of course, is that kidney patients don’t have 30 more years to wait. One hundred thousand patients a year have gone on dialysis for the past six years, and are in the process of dying truncated, miserable lives. The average life expectancy on dialysis is less than five years.

Ninety per cent of them didn’t have to go on the kidney machine at all if only the media had publicised my scientific article when it first came out in September, 2002.

Healthcare in the US and Europe has become too lucrative for anyone involved in either the public or the private sector to want to solve any diseases anymore.

But in the developing world, kidney failure is still a death sentence for all but the rich, and there isn't a highly lucrative 35 year-old industry wanting to stay in business. It may sound paradoxical, but my hopes for medical progress lie with the developing world.

To put this in its larger context, medical genomics, by solving diseases, will usher in a medical revolution, which I’ve called preventive molecular medicine. Even though the First World has paid for the science, it’s likely that the developing world will reap the health benefits first.

What this means practically is that the developing world can easily leap-frog into 21 st century healthcare, since there’s so much less status quo to resist disruption.

DW MOSKOWITZ is chief medical officer and CEO of GenoMed Inc.