As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut or a baseball player.

When I realized I was prone to motion sickness, I backed off the astronaut plan. Later, I learned I couldn’t hit a curveball.

Today, at 65, after a career in media, I have a new plan: to be among the first to recover from ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which has an average survival rate of two to five years. I’m in year two.

I feel optimistic. Every week I read about potential breakthrough drugs. “Novel ALS therapy a game-changer,” declares one. “Treatment Helps Some Patients Improve,” says another. And so on.

However, our U.S. drug development system is slow and dysfunctional. Without systemic fixes, today’s promising ALS drugs will take 10 years to reach sick people like me.

For 35,000 Americans who have ALS, that’s essentially a death sentence.

Happily, there is a plan to speed up the system.

It’s called ACT for ALS, a bill pending in the House. An earlier effort like this streamlined the process of getting new treatments for 700-plus ALS patients, with results still pending.

That’s good news, but the funding for that effort — about $100 million yearly — is a fraction of what’s needed.

Five years ago, we ended the COVID crisis by investing $18 billion in just a few months. We saved untold millions of lives, calling the effort Operation Warp Speed.

Where is Operation Warp Speed for ALS?

There are more than 180 companies and more than 200 drugs in the ALS category pipeline, according to DelveInsight, a pharmaceutical market research firm. Virtually all of them are starving for investment.

They are stuck in a system that favors big, slow-moving pharmaceutical companies and stymies smaller, more nimble researchers. That’s the most harmful dysfunction right now.

The chief science officer at a small, cutting-edge research firm knows this all too well. He shared his frustration in personal correspondence with me, recounting 15 grant applications related to ALS that were all rejected after being reviewed by “key opinion leaders.”

These individuals — unknown outside the medical establishment — are paid by big pharmaceutical companies to review new drugs in development, and we’ve known for years that they tend to overlook drugs created by small companies.

In 2014, a watchdog at UC San Francisco found these opinion leaders are biased toward favorable conclusions about drugs developed by Big Pharma. That same year, the Los Angeles Times reported about their dark role in the opioid epidemic: Even as the lights flashed red, key opinion leaders promoted their patrons’ addictive drugs, which adversely affected 1 in 3 adults in the U.S.

Nature Reviews summed it up in 2021, saying key opinion leaders offer “opinion-based influence … rather than innovation and knowledge.”

Dismantling the problematic system is long overdue. Let’s put those small companies on a fair and level playing field with Big Pharma. Let’s do what the U.S. has long prided itself on doing: Champion the tenacious underdogs.

The Trump administration, for all its flaws, could play a positive role. The iconoclastic director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, has emphasized “encouraging different perspectives.” That’s the opposite of the current playbook.

Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (reportedly now on the ropes), declared on March 18 that the agency would speed the shift to human- and data-centric drug development pipelines, saying, “It’s faster, it’s more effective … and it’s better prediction.”

Although I can’t take credit for Makary’s direction, I said the same thing in a recent op-ed.

The spirit of attempting difficult things makes me feel like a kid again. Back then, whether I was anticipating an Apollo mission or the next battle between Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax, I was always looking forward to something.

My current heroes are not astronauts or hall-of-famers. They are ALS patients like me, willing to try investigative drugs, even as they realize there are no guarantees.

When I watched the live-streamed ACT for ALS news conference hosted by one of the bill’s sponsors, I was amazed by Brian Wallach and Dan Tate. Both have been living for nine years with their ALS diagnosis. Both are raising money for ALS research.

I feel like yelling, “Go team!”

At the event, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health, said something that made me smile big: “There is a belief that we may now have people who survive ALS.”

As another of my boyhood heroes, Hank Aaron, said: “Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, my motto was always to keep swinging.”

As a country, let’s keep swinging at ALS, even if it is one of those darn curveballs.

Kevin J. Morrison is a consultant for nonprofit and other private-sector organizations and a senior producing director at Stanford University.

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, health officials struggled to impress upon the public the grave risks associated with the disease, as well as how easily it could spread.

Now, six years later, public fears have surrounded another type of virus that has killed and sickened passengers on a Dutch-flagged cruise ship; four Californians who were exposed to the virus on the ship recently returned to the United States. This time, however, officials are taking a very different approach to messaging surrounding the deadly Andes virus — a type of hantavirus.

While officials and infectious disease experts have been quick to note the seriousness of the rodent-borne disease, they have also stressed key differences between hantavirus and COVID-19. Namely, that this virus is far less transmissible.

Public alarm over the illness began to grow following reports that three passengers died aboard the stricken vessel, MV Hondius. Worries grew further over the weekend when officials announced that 18 U.S. cruise passengers had disembarked and were returning home.

During a media briefing Monday, the California Department of Public Health said that four state residents had been exposed to the virus, but none had contracted it. Three of them were cruise ship passengers, while the fourth was a Sacramento resident who was on a plane with an infected person in South Africa.

As of now, all four individuals lack symptoms and appear healthy, according to Dr. Erica Pan, director of the department.

One passenger, a Santa Clara resident, disembarked the cruise before the outbreak was recognized and returned to California, she said.

“This person was reported to our department last week and is being monitored by the local public health department where they live,” Pan said.

She added that “the other two passengers disembarked over the weekend in the Canary Islands and have been flown” to a biocontainment facility at the University of Nebraska Medical Center — which is home to the National Quarantine Unit, the only federally funded facility of its kind in the nation.

The quarantine unit is designed to safely house and monitor people who may have been exposed to “high consequence” infectious diseases. A separate biocontainment unit was also created to care for such patients.

The individuals in Nebraska are undergoing a health assessment, and federal authorities will determine when they can return to California. After their return, local health officials will monitor them as necessary.

California’s current public health monitoring protocol includes daily temperature checks, assessment for any symptoms consistent with hantavirus, and direction to modify activities as necessary.

The MV Hondius had 147 people aboard: 86 passengers and 61 crew members. Sixteen passengers from the U.S. boarded a medical repatriation flight arranged by the federal government to Nebraska and remained there as of Monday, including one person who tested “mildly” positive for hantavirus. That person is staying in biocontainment at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Two other passengers, one of whom is showing symptoms of the virus, traveled to Atlanta and are staying in a biocontainment facility at Emory University.

That brings the total number of cases of hantavirus to nine, seven laboratory confirmed and two probable cause, including three deaths.

It’s reasonable for people to be concerned about this latest outbreak, said Dr. Nicole Iovine, chief medical epidemiologist and an infectious disease expert at the University of Florida Shands Hospital. Photographs of healthcare personnel in full personal protective equipment assisting cruise passengers are likely to spark recollections of the pandemic.

Even though this is not an easily transmitted disease, it is transmissible and has a high mortality rate, Iovine said. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said 38% of people who develop respiratory symptoms from hantavirus may die from the disease.

“So it’s reasonable for the medical personnel to take maximal precautions so that they don’t contract it,” Iovine said. “It’s not a reflection of [the virus] being extremely contagious.”

In the U.S., hantavirus cases occur year-round and are transmitted via the urine, feces and saliva of wild rodents.

There were a total of 890 laboratory-confirmed cases of hantavirus in the U.S. between 1993 and 2023, according to the CDC.

The Andes virus, a strain of the disease that’s endemic to Argentina, similarly passes from the exposure of wild rodent particles. Infected humans can then transmit the virus to other people.

Unlike other infectious respiratory illnesses, hantavirus “infects cells very deep in the lungs, so it’s not as easily transmitted then when someone is speaking or coughing,” Iovine said.

COVID-19 transmission occurred when an infected person breathed out droplets and very small particles that contained the virus. Other humans could then inhale the particles or come into contact with them on the surface of objects.

“That’s one of the reasons that makes it much more difficult to transmit person-to-person, and is the reason why this is just not going to turn into a pandemic,” she said.

Experts say person-to-person transmission of the virus occurs only with close and prolonged contact. The hantavirus outbreak is rare but it’s not unusual for a viral outbreak to occur in a cruise ship, where people are packed in and close to each other, said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, member of the American Lung Assn.’s national board of directors.

“From an infectious disease standpoint, that is one of the most difficult and challenging situations and one where it’s more easy to catch something versus other situations,” El-Hasan said.

Experts including Scott Pegan, professor of biomedical sciences at UC Riverside, say the average American’s risk of contracting the disease — if they aren’t within close proximity of an infected individual for a prolonged period — is really low.

Pegan acknowledged it’s confusing to the public when a health incident like this occurs because “they hear ‘this is a really bad disease.’”

“At certain levels, we should worry about it because we don’t want to be interfacing with this virus,” he said.