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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Diminishing returns is a thing, tossing another billion dollars at Cancer research is unlikely to make much of a difference. There are only so many diseases with a proven track record of significant human risk.

SARS was a huge sign that something like SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) was a significant risk. But, give it 10 years and I suspect research funding will once again be scarce until the next outbreak. It’s not about this disease so much as a reasonable response to a range of diseases like Ebola which easily and frequently make the jump to humans.

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Epidemiologists have long argued that we over index on diseases like Ebola, who are too lethal to pose a pandemic risk. There have been 1,590 confirmed Ebola fatalities since 1976. Scary if you live where the outbreaks happen, but surprisingly small for how much we freak out about it.

Should we spend some resources on Ebola? Of course. But those resources should be spent in line with the risks as we best understand them. By 2004 we already had evidence that coronaviruses were much more dangerous than Ebola, with the 2003/2004 SARS outbreak killing half as many people (774) as Ebola has in nearly 50 years. Ignoring COVID-19, SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses) have killed 1,640 people, exceeding Ebola’s grim toll.

You seem to be very low on your Ebola numbers[0]. Is that based on a super-strict definition of "confirmed"?

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28755033

Pulled from Wikipedia, which might've been a mistake.

> surprisingly small for how much we freak out about it.

It might be small _because_ we freak out about it. Kind of like New Zealand's COVID-19 numbers (or other countries with aggressive prevention / mitigation methods).

In comparing diseases we probably want to compare their transmission and mortality rates and long-term effects. If we compare their infection or death count then we're comparing the disease + the response together which muddies the waters a bit.

Cancer is common enough and bad enough that even a small difference matters. For comparison, even in the countries with the worst outbreaks, cancer is expected to kill more people than SARS-CoV-2 this year.

Cancer isn't one disease, though. We lump hundreds of conditions and causes under that descriptor. Counting cancer totals that way is more like counting SARS-CoV-2 and influenza and colds all together.

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