LINK: Diseases not sufficiently researched

polymathwannabe

This Chart Shows The Worst Diseases That Don't Get Enough Research Money

We have already covered this topic several times on LW, but what prompted me to link this was this remark:

Of course, where research dollars flow isn't —and shouldn't be— dictated simply in terms of which diseases lay claim to the most years, but also by, perhaps most importantly, where researchers see the most potential for a breakthrough.

[Edit: a former, dumber version of me had asked, "I wonder what criterion the author would prefer," before the correct syntax of the sentence was pointed out to me.]

Opinions?

This Chart Shows The Worst Diseases That Don't Get Enough Research Money

We have already covered this topic several times on LW, but what prompted me to link this was this remark:

Of course, where research dollars flow isn't —and shouldn't be— dictated simply in terms of which diseases lay claim to the most years, but also by, perhaps most importantly, where researchers see the most potential for a breakthrough.

[Edit: a former, dumber version of me had asked, "I wonder what criterion the author would prefer," before the correct syntax of the sentence was pointed out to me.]

Opinions?

I found the 'injury' entry too, but I'm not sure it is a good target for improving. 'injury' is broad. I know what HIV is, and I have a good idea of what researchers might do to improve it ('develop a vaccine'; 'discover a new drug'), but what does one do with a category like 'injury'?

Presumably this category embraces everything from burning yourself on a stove to falling on ice to heavy machinery at work killing you; there's not one or a few different problems there, but thousands of distinct ones which have next to no causal mechanisms in common. (And people are frustrated by cancers...!)

So research may have counterintuitively low ROI: OK, so you managed to cut stove burns by say 10% using your extremely expensive public health campaign to switch as many houses as possible from electric coils to induction heating, but stove burns were only say 5% of all accidents in the first place so your ROI works out to be terrible compared to dumping even more money into HIV or something.

The causes of injury are quite skewed. From the CDC, here is chart showing leading causes of "fatal unintentional injury": http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2012-a.pdf. Note that this isn't DALY-lost.

As expected, car accidents and falls in the elderly account for a largest chunk of deaths. Next you have a cluster of poisoning and suicide (which I guess is classified as unintentional?). Some quick googling suggests that traffic accidents and falls are both roughly top 20 in lead... (read more)

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LINK: Diseases not sufficiently researched

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LINK: Diseases not sufficiently researched

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