The properties of aspirin defy even the most effusive drug company pitch, writes Kieran Fagan.
Aspirin truly is the wonder drug. Not only does it relieve headaches, lower temperature and soothe aching limbs, it helps ward off heart attacks. It also defends against strokes, deep vein thrombosis, cataracts, migraine and may be effective against some cancers.
This year, Columbia University, New York, research scientists confirmed that an aspirin a day can dramatically reduce the chances of a woman developing breast cancer. Previous research showed that men can similarly reduce the risk of prostate cancer, and both sexes are helped to avoid colon cancer.
The Polypill - a blend of aspirin, folic acid, three blood pressure drugs and a cholesterol reducing agent - could cut strokes and heart attacks by up to 80 per cent if taken by everyone in high-risk categories, say the researchers in London and Auckland who developed it.
Sadly, the commercial return on such a low-cost drug, with patents expired, make it unlikely that the major pharmaceutical companies will be interested in marketing it when the tests are complete.
"Most of the recent research which has revealed the added value which aspirin offers has been done by university research departments with health service funding, and only minimal support from the pharmaceutical manufacturers," says British journalist Diarmuid Jeffreys, author of a new book on aspirin.
"The prices and margins are too low for them. There's much more money to be made on the high-price items like beta-blockers and the companies argue that they need high returns to fund continuing research programmes," says Jeffreys, whose father is Welsh and mother Irish.
The story of aspirin is not one of those eureka moments - its humble beginnings are found in man's experimentation with herbal remedies. Aspirin's key ingredient is drawn from the salicylates, chemicals which occur in plants, in particular the willow tree, from which the ancient Egyptians made extracts to treat aches and pains. Some worked, some didn't and no one knew why.
Fast forward to Edward Stone, an 18th-century country vicar, who absent-mindedly chewed a piece of willow bark and thought its sharp taste indicated the presence of quinine - used then to combat malaria.
He was wrong, but his writings prompted serious inquiry into the active ingredient of salicylates and reducing the corrosive effect they had on the stomach - a concern with aspirin that continues in some quarters to this day. The risk of causing stomach bleeding has to be weighed against the benefits of taking the pills regularly.
The industrial exploitation of aspirin began in the dying days of the 19th century, with epic battles between the original manufacturer, Bayer, and others, including Sterling Health, then emerging from being a peddler of quack medicines. Attempts to patent aspirin failed, so the battleground shifted to trade marks.
Anti-German sentiment damaged its public acceptance, but an outbreak of Spanish flu,so-called, changed all that. This was no ordinary flu, but an epidemic which struck just as the first World War ended.
Jeffreys' investigations took him to a graveyard on the south coast of England, where he found clusters of simple headstones giving name, rank and regiment of fallen soldiers of the first World War. He was struck by the dates on so many headstones. November, December 1918, and into 1919, days, weeks and months after war ended.
These soldiers and sailors did not die in battle; they were victims of the influenza which eventually carried away between 16 and 18 million people worldwide, many more than ever fell in war.
Aspirin did not, of course, cure the flu, but it alleviated many symptoms, and that epidemic, in the true sense of the overused word, popularised the drug.
In Ireland, we have our own vivid reminder of that cruel toll. In Grange Gorman military graveyard, on Dublin's Blackhorse Avenue, rows of plain headstones commemorate soldiers and sailors. One tells us that Pte M O'Reilly of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, aged 19, died the day after the war ended. To his right lie 18 comrades who died around the same time, to his left, 36.
There's a row of about 50 more flu deaths behind them, and there are others scattered around that peaceful well-tended resting place.
My grandfather, not a soldier, was sent home from the Rotunda hospital in Dublin in December 1918 to die of flu. "We can do no more for him," his young wife was told. I like to think that she gave him aspirin to ease his pains. In old age, there was always a bottle in her kitchen dresser.
The first manufacturer, the Bayer Company, played a huge part in the early popularisation of the little white pill, but its collaboration with the Nazis makes grim reading.
After the second World War, a soluble version, Disprin, flowered, but other headache pills later took centre stage, panadol (paracetamol), Tylenol, and Brufen.
Then just when the aspirin star seemed to be waning, like a virus which mutates to outwit vaccines, everything changed again.
Two British scientists, John Vane and Priscilla Piper, published a paper which solved the mystery of how aspirin worked, in particular how it affects blood. Now the stage was set for a dramatic resurgence in which an old remedy could be deployed against hitherto intractable problems.
"Many epidemiologists believe that nearly everyone over the age of 50 would be better taking aspirin regularly," says Jeffreys.
"The relatively small risk of dangerous side effects - one person in a thousand might suffer serious bleeding - are outweighed by the benefits."
He tells a story which blends politics, big business, social and medical history, greed, incredible dedication and human folly in a lively page-turner read. More than that, for the over 50s, it offers real hope of better health and longer life.
Aspirin, the story of a wonder drug. Diarmuid Jeffreys, Bloomsbury £16.99 (UK)