And breast cancer gets more funding than pancreatic cancer even though pancreatic cancer kills about everyone who gets it because, you know, the boobies.
As far as malaria is concerned, DDT turns out to be real effective at killing mosquitoes, the major problem in the developing world of LOTS of infectious diseases. But those of us in the developed world got more concerned with the eagles and stuff and essentially go out of our way to keep DDT from being used even though it's use in the developing world would literally save tens of thousands of human lives. The governments of the developed world did that, not capitalism.
It's a grey world out there and while it's much easier to get clicks with "male baldness gets more funding than malaria so capitalism doesn't work", it's not really very helpful in actually fixing things.
> And breast cancer gets more funding than pancreatic cancer even though pancreatic cancer kills about everyone who gets it because, you know, the boobies
Or perhaps breast cancer gets more funding because it's far more common? Here in the UK, the incidence rate for breast cancer is 125.7/100,000, whereas the incidence rate for pancreatic cancer is 9.3/100,000.
And before you say "but pancreatic cancer kills more people", that's also not true. Again, in the UK the mortality rate for breast cancer is 24.3/100,000, whereas for pancreatic cancer it's 12.6/100,000 [1].
More people die from breast cancer than pancreatic cancer. That's why the former is funded more than the latter. Not "because, you know, the boobies".
> Among the big cancers, breast cancer receives the most funding per new case, $2,596 — and by far the most money relative to each death, $13,452. Notably, prostate cancer, the most common cancer, receives the least funding per new case at just $1,318. But on a per-death basis it ranks second, with $11,298 in N.C.I. funds.
Again, not sure it's much more grey than that. In the US, breast cancer gets more funding in part because the Susan G. Komen organization is massive, powerful and well connected. Age adjusted death rates for females has fallen dramatically since 1975 while funding has dramatically increased.
Yes funding happens because breast cancer happens more but also because the breast cancer lobby exists and the pancreatic cancer lobby mostly doesn't.
Also I would like to note that prostate cancer exist in the same amounts as breast cancer, and has much less research funding...
And there are some nasty politics related to that, including prostate cancer researchers being labelled "misogynists" or "patriarchalists" just because they called our that breast cancer has more funding.
It's a little more nuanced than that. 1.47% of women aged 40 will develop breast cancer within ten years, but only 0.34% of men aged 40 will develop prostate cancer over a similar time period (according to the CDC risk statistics).
0.01% of 30 year old men will develop prostate cancer within ten years, as opposed to 0.44% for women/breast cancer. That's a huge difference.
One of the reasons there is more funding for breast cancer is that it often manifests itself earlier, meaning the benefits of treating it in terms of years saved is much greater.
Lots of men die of old age with prostate cancer, not because of it. Breast cancer is a far deadlier disease, one that strikes more young people, women and men (rate of incidence about 1% that of women).
Prostate cancer is dramatically less virulent, isn't it? To the point where the medical community is starting to say early screening can be a negative thing, because loads of folks get surgery for cancer that never would've killed them?
> As far as malaria is concerned, DDT turns out to be real effective at killing mosquitoes, the major problem in the developing world of LOTS of infectious diseases. But those of us in the developed world got more concerned with the eagles and stuff and essentially go out of our way to keep DDT from being used even though it's use in the developing world would literally save tens of thousands of human lives.
In many impoverished areas it is largely ineffective as a mosquito pesticide now. If we'd use it more liberally, it's possible that resistance would have developed more quickly due to the increased selection pressure. DDT is not a silver bullet.
As far as malaria is concerned, DDT turns out to be real effective at killing mosquitoes, the major problem in the developing world of LOTS of infectious diseases. But those of us in the developed world got more concerned with the eagles and stuff and essentially go out of our way to keep DDT from being used even though it's use in the developing world would literally save tens of thousands of human lives. The governments of the developed world did that, not capitalism.
It's a grey world out there and while it's much easier to get clicks with "male baldness gets more funding than malaria so capitalism doesn't work", it's not really very helpful in actually fixing things.