Hacker News Reader

Comment by reasonattlm | Hacker News Reader

http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...

"The process of declaring parts of aging as a disease is driven by regulation: the FDA does not permit treatments for aging, only for named diseases. Since there is little funding for research that cannot be legally commercialized, the incentive is to carve off chunks of the process of aging and go through the process of having government employees add it to the list of diseases - which can take years and millions of dollars. Sarcopenia, for example, is still not recognized by the FDA, meaning that no potential treatment can be commercially developed in the US. Here is an example of this process at work for memory loss."

View on HN

Freaking ridiculous. In a rational world, the question would be how many billions of dollars to allocate to anti-aging research. Instead, the government makes it actively illegal to try to mitigate the major cause of medical expenses and a huge contributor to decreased quality of life.

A corollary to that longevitymeme quote is the politicization of research. For example, AIDS research gets funded at a disproportionate rate to the number of sufferers, presumably because they form an active voting constituency.

So I claim that the question is not "how many billions of dollars to allocate to anti-aging research".

The real question is how to get government and politics out of the system. They're the ones that are getting everything discombobulated.

Let people speak with their own actions (and wallets) about how much resource should be allocated to various areas of medical research.

AIDS and the fear of it affects the lifestyles of most sexually active people, not just people who actually have the disease (or know someone who does).

Not for rational reasons. In the US, HIV is mostly confined to tiny slices of the population (gays, blacks, IV drug users).

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm#inciden...

You've just described groups making up about 15-20% of the U.S. population; that's not really "tiny".

If you follow the links, one of the large slices you don't account for is "high-risk heterosexual contact", which makes up about 1/3 of new HIV infections. That's people who are not part of one of the high-risk groups, but have had at least one partner who was (which may or may not have been known to them). So the proportion of people who have some rational reason to worry is relatively high, unless you are absolutely sure that none of your sexual partners have themselves ever belonged to one of the high-risk groups. That's a particularly common route of HIV infection among women, since not all bisexual men self-identify as bisexual or disclose that part of their sexual history to female partners.

With 50K people infected, it's tiny slice of even the gay population.

But the threat that AIDS represents is much larger. Why spend a lot of resources fixing a tiny hole on a large boat? The hole isn't leaking much? Well, it's the scary potential that mandates treatment and prevention.

That's the number of new infections in 2006. As HIV/AIDS takes a long time to run its course, and it stays around for life with a very few exceptions involving bone marrow transplants from naturally immune people it, I'm certain that the total number of people infected is at least an order of magnitude higher. 500,000 people in the US is about one in 600, making it an uncommon but not especially rare disease.

For any reasonable definition, I think gays and IV drug users are a tiny slice of the population. A quick google search suggests that 1-3% of the population is gay.

If we assume that HIV rates among blacks are distributed the same way as in the general population, then we find that black gays alone account for about 40% of HIV infections in 2008, while making up 0.1-0.3% of the population. Unfortunately, the data I linked to is not granular enough to prove this.

A comparison: gay sex was about 55-170x more dangerous than straight sex in 2008 (depending on whether 3% or 1%of america is gay). Unprotected sex is only about 6-20x more dangerous than sex with a condom (depending on which set of wikipedia numbers you pick).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condom#In_preventing_STDs

AIDS also generally affects young and generally healthy people, vs. a lot of diseases which affect older people. From a purely economic standpoint, losing a 25 year old is more economically harmful than losing a 5 year old or a 65 year old.

Imagine a discovery would allow people to routinely live to 120 years, or more. The financial black hole that is social security NOW would suddenly spike to an even more frightening mass.

When government payments fund the livelihood of retired folks, there is a financial disincentive to fund "anti-aging" research.

Yeah but you're just imagining ONE part of a really complicated system changing. In fact, when life expectancy goes up and elder quality of life with it, you'll see a shift in society. People will work far longer, they will have multiple careers, etc.

Laws will change when the population changes enough.

Excellent, excellent point. I'd give you more Karma if I could.

I would mention though, that the process of reclassifying conditions as diseases is also driven by the desire for commercialization itself.

Even if the FDA did permit treatment for aging, such treatment could be seen "bleeding edged" or "unnatural" and have a smaller audience. If a symptom of aging could be classified as a disease, a person will have not only the option to obtain treatment but the obligation.

"Bob, you have not been getting treatment for your winkle-itis, don't you think that's bit irresponsible?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com