While reading news at the BCC I came accross and interesting article:



Of course this is the stats from the UK, but the stats from the United States are similar from what I have found so far. From LUNGevity:




Questions For Debate:

Is it acceptable to have the most deadly cancer to recieve the least amount of funding?

It seems to me that trying to figure out how much funding should be provided for research into each disease is an extraordinarily difficult process. Some important factors to consider would be how common the disease is, how fatal it is, how much suffering it causes, what its costs are to society, how much of a public health problem it threatens, and so on.

Beyond the disease itself, however, other factors must be kept in mind. Research into ways to prevent or cure a certain disease may result in important scientific findings unrelated to the disease itself. For example, prion diseases ("mad cow" disease and so on) are rare; however, they represent a kind of disease quite different from any other kind of disease, and therefore offer the possibility of discovering a large amount of new scientific information which could be critical to public health in the future. Lung cancer research, although certainly extremely important, may not require quite as much research into unexplored areas.

The advocates for increased lung cancer research funding make a good case, but the amount of money spent per death should not be the only factor to consider.

The problem is this is a bit of a false situation. If there were a big pool of money the government had, and it had to dole it all out to every disease research in the book, then I suppose it should probably go proportonatly to those that killed the most. This would SUCK for those people who contracted rare diseases mind you. Assuming Lung cancer (160,000 deaths per year in the US) gets about 180 million dollars per year in funding (which is what it gets now) then anyone suffering from Japanese encephalitis which kills about 4 people a year in the US, would have to deal with about 300k in funding, or enough for 2 researchers with no lab or equipment or facilities.


But it does not work that way. The government does provide funding to be sure, as do hospitals and registered charities. And a lot of the research money comes from registered charities and their funding drives, and individual donations, often from friends and elatives of the dead. So as far as I can tell, the only way to change this would be to tell Mrs Smith, whose husband just died of lung cancer: "Sorry, Lung cancer has too much money, you need to donate your money to rectal cancer research instead".

Obviously, not a practical solution.