[hobofan]

> What's not rational is cutting funding to supposedly disappeared diseases. They do re-occurr. The Spanish Flu died out at first, only to re-emerge in WW1 trenches and wreck absolute destruction.

Wouldn't the fact that the disease has disappeared in human populations greatly increase the required funding and limit the effectiveness of the research? The best you could do would be to produce a bandwidth of candidate drugs that can't advance to human trials for ethical reasons.