Do The Media Drive Disproportionate Funding For AIDS?
Should society pay any price to stop the AIDS epidemic? The temptation is to say yes. But what if the price includes less help for victims of other diseases? Though AIDS is an undeniable tragedy, medical science is always confronted with trade-offs when allocating finite research dollars, and the actual “disease burden” of AIDS, measured in the number of persons affected and life-years lost, is lower than many other diseases. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (June 17, 1999) shows that AIDS ranks below such conditions as diabetes, stroke, and asthma in disease burden. On a number of measures, AIDS ranked between 15th and 20th out of 29 conditions examined. There is, however, a dramatic exception to the rankings: AIDS is far and away the largest recipient of National Institutes of Health funding. • In fact, AIDS receives nearly 30 percent ($1.4 billion) of all NIH funding, almost four times the amount allocated to the next largest recipient, breast cancer rese
