Tax Dollars in Medical Research

[Jadow]

AIDS 3.2b funding per year 14k deaths per year $226k per death
Cancer 6b 560k deaths per year $10,700k
Heart Disease 2.1b 864k deaths per year $2429

WTH? Does the govt determine funding based on what causes are most popular instead of bang for buck scientific research?

I have several relatives who have died from or are sick with heart disease or cancer. Never even met someone with AIDS.

Why are we spending 100 times more per death on AIDS than heart disease?

Also makes me question what the basis for global warming research funding is. Could that money be better spent? But because some celebs are pushing it, it gets pushed to the top.

--edit I'm not even going to get into whether tax money should even go to medical research...

Source: http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm

 

[JSt0rm]

The day we let peasants decide what research is valid or not is the day we are truly dead in the sciences.

 

[theeedude]

Good, there is plenty of private money being spent on heart disease and cancer research.

 

[manimal]

With the majority of private money looking for breaktroughs in erection malfunctions some money being spent of cures is a good thing..


How many diseases have been cured as of late? Now how many pills that require you to take one a day to offset symptoms have been created this month?

 

[sandorski]

AIDs research has more benefit than just addressing AIDs. It also addresses treating Viruses in general, that's something that little is known about.

Then there are the differences of AIDs is communicable and a recent phenomena.

 

[IGBT]

research money is scarce. the eco-KOOKS rob real science in favor of supporting their hoax. They hid behind their rigged computer models and consensus conspiracy supported by willing accomplice's in the media and academia. They want it to be true so they create a facade of truth. All the while real research is starved and people die.

 

[IronWing]

research money is scarce. the eco-KOOKS rob real science in favor of supporting their hoax. They hid behind their rigged computer models and consensus conspiracy supported by willing accomplice's in the media and academia. They want it to be true so they create a facade of truth. All the while real research is starved and people die.

Medical research spending absolutely dwarfs spending in all other scientific fields combined so your post is just plain god damned stupid.

 

[manimal]

Medical research spending absolutely dwarfs spending in all other scientific fields combined so your post is just plain god damned stupid.

but he said it with such feeling...

 

[hal2kilo]

With the majority of private money looking for breaktroughs in erection malfunctions some money being spent of cures is a good thing..


How many diseases have been cured as of late? Now how many pills that require you to take one a day to offset symptoms have been created this month?

Why would would the pharmacutical companies be looking for a cure when they can take a legacy medicine used for deworming your pet and turn around and use it for treating colon cancer and charge 100x what you can buy it for over the counter. Profit motive at human misery in considered an admiral traight by the morality of modern day capitalist.

 

[sandorski]

Why would would the pharmacutical companies be looking for a cure when they can take a legacy medicine used for deworming your pet and turn around and use it for treating colon cancer and charge 100x what you can buy it for over the counter. Profit motive at human misery in considered an admiral traight by the morality of modern day capitalist.

There are numerous Old Drugs which have met the same fate. New discovery is made on what an Old Drug can treat, Price begins to sky rocket. Then there are numerous Drugs which were almost exclusively Publicly Funded, yet the Pharma Industry Prices them as if they Funded the whole Research Cost.

As I have repeated often, Americans are not subsidizing other Nations much lower Drug Prices, they are merely Paying more because they are Willing to pay more.

 

[manimal]

Why would would the pharmacutical companies be looking for a cure when they can take a legacy medicine used for deworming your pet and turn around and use it for treating colon cancer and charge 100x what you can buy it for over the counter. Profit motive at human misery in considered an admiral trait by the morality of modern day capitalist.

The Amounts of money big Pharma makes is astonishing. Wonder how soon they will start making pills to allow you take other pills...

 

[werepossum]

If you count the number of people worldwide infected with HIV, it becomes a rather bigger problem. Since heart disease and cancer are both pretty well studied by now whereas AIDS is fairly new and is our first really widespread lethal retrovirus, AIDS research seems like a pretty good investment. And as Sandorski said, we know little about treating, much less curing, virus infections, especially retroviruses. Should we actually succeed in curing AIDS, we'd have much greater understanding in treating viruses of all kinds. (Full disclosure: I did lose a good friend in the prime of life to AIDS.)

My only major problem with all science research is in the patent mechanisms. If federal money is involved in the research, the federal government should proportionally own any patents filed. And patents purchased to sit on should revert back to government control; either show reasonable progress and honest intent in turning that patent into therapy, or lose it to someone who will. This practice of using federal tax money to fund research and awarding patents to the research university, who then sell those patents to corporations, who then sit on them to prevent the new knowledge from upsetting their existing maintenance drug cash cows, is immoral and needs to end.

 

[CycloWizard]

How many of you idiots claiming that people aren't working towards cures work in medical research? I already know the answer, but I would be interested to see if any of you will admit it. Your ignorance speaks louder than any admission, but confession is good for the soul.

 

[silverpig]

AIDS is almost a non-issue now in terms of treatment. Very few people in the western world die of AIDS if they are properly medicated.

I attended a speech by Dr. Julio Montaner, one of the foremost researchers in the world on AIDS and now AIDS treatment policy. He said that the best AIDS drugs that money could buy 10 years ago are now available for $1 a day. The same stuff that Magic Johnson took can now be sent to Africa for next to nothing.

A cure would be nice, but a vaccine (working on it), an effective treatment (have several), and an effective testing and treatment system (decent in developed countries, non-existent elsewhere) could make AIDS a thing of the past.

 

[ShawnD1]

How many of you idiots claiming that people aren't working towards cures work in medical research? I already know the answer, but I would be interested to see if any of you will admit it. Your ignorance speaks louder than any admission, but confession is good for the soul.

I worked in the research and QC department of a drug company that makes HIV medication. The goal was never to cure HIV but to stop it from spreading. The drugs we were making apparently were designed to stop good cells from becoming infected, so if you started taking our drug when 10% of your cells had HIV infected DNA, you would still only be at 10% in 5 or 10 years. Without the drug, the HIV spreads into all of the cells so you go from 10% infected to 20%, 30%, etc until your whole system goes down.

The company had no plans for trying to make a vaccine. If people want to donate money to find a vaccine, then that's fine, but it's not a good business idea to spend money on something like that.

 

[Anarchist420]

One would think with all that money the damn disease would have a cure.

 

[CycloWizard]

I worked in the research and QC department of a drug company that makes HIV medication. The goal was never to cure HIV but to stop it from spreading. The drugs we were making apparently were designed to stop good cells from becoming infected, so if you started taking our drug when 10% of your cells had HIV infected DNA, you would still only be at 10% in 5 or 10 years. Without the drug, the HIV spreads into all of the cells so you go from 10% infected to 20%, 30%, etc until your whole system goes down.

The company had no plans for trying to make a vaccine. If people want to donate money to find a vaccine, then that's fine, but it's not a good business idea to spend money on something like that.

So in your one lab in one company working on treatment for a virus, no one is working on a cure? I'm not surprised. Do you think this is true in general - that no one is working on a cure for diseases?

 

[Schadenfroh]

With the majority of private money looking for breaktroughs in erection malfunctions..

You forgot hair loss treatments.

 

[Thump553]

So in your one lab in one company working on treatment for a virus, no one is working on a cure? I'm not surprised. Do you think this is true in general - that no one is working on a cure for diseases?

From my layman's understanding of the science, HIV/AIDS mutates so rapidly that the chance of immunizing against it are very slim.

That said, wasn't it just in the news that taking a current (expensive) cocktail of HIV drugs seems to be preventing healthy people from coming down with the disease?

The OP's method of analysis ignores most factors that should be considered-including the facts that HIV/AIDS is a new human disease, that it is infectious and spreading and that there is no known cure. We should be throwing money at that area. Unfortunately the marketplace dictates that drug companies focus on penis pills and baldness cures-that is where the big money to be made is.

 

[ShawnD1]

So in your one lab in one company working on treatment for a virus, no one is working on a cure? I'm not surprised. Do you think this is true in general - that no one is working on a cure for diseases?

Yeah pretty much. If a drug company were to find a cure after putting billions of dollars into research, they would need to sell the cure for hundreds of thousands of dollars just to break even. There's no way a project like that would ever make money.

Come on now, you're smarter than this. You know that finding a cure would be a net loss of money.

 

[CycloWizard]

Yeah pretty much. If a drug company were to find a cure after putting billions of dollars into research, they would need to sell the cure for hundreds of thousands of dollars just to break even. There's no way a project like that would ever make money.

Come on now, you're smarter than this. You know that finding a cure would be a net loss of money.

Posters in this thread have asserted that grant-based research isn't interested in finding cures. Since I know plenty of university researchers working in this direction, I called shens. Your anecdotal evidence of one lab working on one disease, which is not a particularly good candidate for curing outright in the first place, is meaningless to the conversation. You're smarter than that.

 

[jhbball]

research money is scarce. the eco-KOOKS rob real science in favor of supporting their hoax. They hid behind their rigged computer models and consensus conspiracy supported by willing accomplice's in the media and academia. They want it to be true so they create a facade of truth. All the while real research is starved and people die.

lol @ deniers.