I don’t usually send jokes over the Internet (or even tell them very often), mostly because I can’t remember them. This howler arrived last week from my cousin Jodi—who received it from a friend whose father was in the pharmaceutical business. I just had to pass it along. Take everything between the quotation marks with a grain of salt, please…

"In the field of pharmacology, all drugs have two names, a trade name and a generic name. For example, the popular drug known by the trade name of Tylenol also has a generic name of acetaminophen. Aleve is also called naproxen. Amoxil’s generic is amoxicillin and Advil is called ibuprofen.

The FDA has been looking for a generic name for Viagra. After careful consideration by a team of government experts, it recently announced that it has settled on the generic name of Mycoxafloppin. Also considered were Mycoxafailin, Mydixadrupin, Mydixarizin, Dixafix, and of course, Ibepokin.

 Pfizer Corp., which manufactures Viagra and is searching for new formulations that will allow the company to maintain its market share, announced today that Viagra will soon be available in liquid form, and will be marketed by Pepsi Cola as a power beverage suitable for use as a mixer. It will now be possible for a man to literally pour himself a stiff one. Obviously we can no longer call this a soft drink, and it gives new meaning to the names of "cocktails", "highballs" and just a good old-fashioned "stiff drink." Pepsi will market the new concoction by the name of 'MOUNT & DO'."

Guffaw, definitely. But a thought for the day:

Right now, more money is being spent on developing and marketing erectile dysfunction drugs ($2 billion in 2006) than the federal government is committing to Alzheimer's research—around $1 billion. You know the statistics all too well: Five million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, including 500,000 people under the age of 65. Earlier this year, the Alzheimer's Association estimated that someone in America is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s every 72 seconds. It's the seventh leading cause of death in the United States and nearly as prevalent in Japan and Europe. The direct and indirect costs of Alzheimer's in the U.S. amount to $148 billion annually. In 2005, state and federal Medicaid spending for nursing home and home care for people with Alzheimer's and other dementias was estimated at $21 billion; that number is expected to increase to $27 billion by 2015. If the disease proceeds unimpeded, by 2030, the number of people with Alzheimer's is projected to increase to 7.7 million. When you consider that by 2030, almost one in five Americans will be over sixty-five, it's apparent that we face a health burden that will swamp us.

If you don’t want to end your life this way, you need to let Washington know about it. How fast we can get this disease under control depends largely on how much money we can throw at it. New tools that will permit early diagnosis and treatment are on the horizon, including biomarkers that assess protein levels in urine, cerebrospinal fluid and blood. There are currently eight drugs in Phase III clinical trials for Alzheimer's. One primary prevention trial costs more than $30 million and takes five to ten years. So write to your representatives in Congress and tell them you want a treatment sooner, rather than later. Even better, sign up at your local university Alzheimer's center to participate in a research—they need normal subjects as well as subjects who may be in the early stages of dementia. For more information about participating in clinical trials, visit the Alzheimer's Association website. For a list of universities with active Alzheimer's research programs, go to this list on my website. For more on the subject of Alzheimer's research, see Chapters 17 and 18 of Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife. You’ll be doing yourself—and the rest of us—a big favor.