As your story emphasizes, the pill hasn't been developed yet and hasn't been tried on a patient population. So far, it is just an idea http://menshealth.about.com/cs/hearthealth/a/poly_pill.htm .
Meanwhile, an already-existing American compound (we the writers are not connected with the company or the drug) that is part of a new breed of "nanobiotics", has been prescribed since 2001 by well-known cardiologists. It has been reported by them to produce clinically measurable reductions in bad cholesterol, arterial blockage, and chest pain in very ill patients, by targeting a novel infection http://www.nanobaclabs.com/Patients/
The question is, why has the compound gone largely unreported in America's national news media, while a foreign proposal for another treatment that doesn't exist received such broad coverage?
Many infections such as Chlamydia and Herpes have been and identified in cardiovascular disease, but treating them has not reversed heart disease, so researchers have always suspected something else is at work.
The potential existence of a new type of infection and a compound that might get rid of it affects millions of seriously ill heart patients who have exhausted other options such as stents, bypasses, and blood thinners.
Moreover, the discoveries provide a plausible explanation for something that has stumped doctors for generations: calcification in heart, kidney and gum disease www.heartfixer.com/Pathological_calcification.htm
Business journals http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/storieswww.heartfixer.com/Pathological_calcification.htm/2003/05/26/story2.html?t=printable and television news in Florida (Fox 13 November 20, 2002) have covered the drug for some time, but national media have not. Why?
The compound, known as NanobacTX, is far from being totally proven and is heavily debated, but it is years ahead of the still-fictional polypill that received saturation coverage. Why then such a discrepancy in attention?
Perhaps it's because no clinical studies have been published about the American compound, although one was just completed http://www.nanobaclabs.com/Research/ , numerous case histories have been made public http://www.heartfixer.com/NB%20-%20Case%20Studies.htm, and an article about it has been published in the respected heart journal "Circulation"
However, no clinical studies have been done on the polypill either, due to the fact that it doesn't exist, so that can't explain such wide discrepancies in media coverage.
Another possibility is the source. The polypill was proposed by a big name institution the Institute of Preventative Medicine http://www.smd.qmul.ac.uk/wolfson/ in a big name biotech location, LondonEngland, near big-time media outlets.
By contrast, the American heart compound comes from a small biotech company that is not affiliated with a big name institute. Nonetheless, the cardiologist who conducted the clinical trial, Dr. Benedict Maniscalco, is the founder of one of America's respected heart institutes, St. Joseph's Hospital Heart Institute http://sjbhealth.org/bodyframeset.cfm?id=25 .
Or, perhaps it is because the underlying pathogen that the nanobiotic targets is hotly debated by scientists http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/projects/cases/nanobacteria/nanobacteria notes.html . However, so are possible results from the polypill, so we can also rule that out as a determinant.
Are there historical parallels for such a lack of coverage about a ground-breaking drug that combats infection but does not come from a big institution ? Yes. And it's disturbing.
Helicobacter pylori, a known bacteria, was found to be the cause of stomach ulcers by Australian researchers who developed a cure for it in the early 1980s.
