It seems to me that research funding is surprisingly well calibrated with a bias for infectous diseases as opposed to what I as an amateur would call “structural failure” collecting ischemic heart disease, stroke, injury and so on.
I too was incredibly surprised to see how close everything lies to the 1:1 line. Most overfunded only 16% over the line? Most underfunded 11% below? Holy crap, the people behind that deserve a medal.
Looking at the “overfunded” category the worst offenders are HIV and cancer. I suppose cancer research is overfunded because people donate to causes their loved ones suffered and cancer tends to kill old people with a lot of money. But I have no good explanation for the overfunding of HIV which is a completely preventable disease on the personal level by using a condom and refraining from using IV drugs.
I suspect cancer is probably at least partially up because there’s so many subfields of cancer that don’t always behave like each other. There’s breast cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer… a lot of the time you need to do separate research on each, and that kind of duplication might spill over into money applied.
Could HIV funding levels being a bit over the ratio be a result of recent declines in disease burden but an unchanged allocation? Antiretrovirals have massively decreased the burden on the big overhang of those who got the disease over the decade before they were developed, at least in developed countries, and at least until resistant strains develop.
Or perhaps the desire to end an expanding disease, thus taking into account future levels of expanded burden? It’s not like advances in treating HIV are intended only for the US where the only reason it’s still expanding is that the people who are infected live on for decades while on average not ‘replacing’ thesmselves (you can see a small dip in the number of people with the disease in the nineties, as new infection rates declined but before antiretrovirals kept those with the disease alive longer). Most of the bad effect is centered in Africa where its growing much much more rapidly. And I don’t think it being preventable really enters into these calculations, as prevention has obviously not actually worked in many places. Though prevention should obviously be a big fraction of the effort against it.
As for Inury being underfunded, isn’t it also the case that ‘research’ on injury has been going on for as long as there have been people, whereas molecular biology and germ theory and the like have opened up new vistas in treating communicable diseases and many other things only in the last century or two? There’s probably a lot less expected utility in the research they can do there.
I too was incredibly surprised to see how close everything lies to the 1:1 line. Most overfunded only 16% over the line? Most underfunded 11% below? Holy crap, the people behind that deserve a medal.
I suspect cancer is probably at least partially up because there’s so many subfields of cancer that don’t always behave like each other. There’s breast cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer… a lot of the time you need to do separate research on each, and that kind of duplication might spill over into money applied.
Could HIV funding levels being a bit over the ratio be a result of recent declines in disease burden but an unchanged allocation? Antiretrovirals have massively decreased the burden on the big overhang of those who got the disease over the decade before they were developed, at least in developed countries, and at least until resistant strains develop.
Or perhaps the desire to end an expanding disease, thus taking into account future levels of expanded burden? It’s not like advances in treating HIV are intended only for the US where the only reason it’s still expanding is that the people who are infected live on for decades while on average not ‘replacing’ thesmselves (you can see a small dip in the number of people with the disease in the nineties, as new infection rates declined but before antiretrovirals kept those with the disease alive longer). Most of the bad effect is centered in Africa where its growing much much more rapidly. And I don’t think it being preventable really enters into these calculations, as prevention has obviously not actually worked in many places. Though prevention should obviously be a big fraction of the effort against it.
As for Inury being underfunded, isn’t it also the case that ‘research’ on injury has been going on for as long as there have been people, whereas molecular biology and germ theory and the like have opened up new vistas in treating communicable diseases and many other things only in the last century or two? There’s probably a lot less expected utility in the research they can do there.