[slillibri]

Cancer kills over 9 million people per year, or 18x strep A. Tuberculosis kills nearly 1.5 million people per year, or 3x. Over 9 million people die from hunger related causes, which while not a disease is 18x strep A. It's not to demean the people who die from strep A, because to each of their families it's a tragedy, but the scale and the fact that it can be treated with common antibiotics means that we can put the effort and resources that would be spent on a vaccine to better use elsewhere.

[kelnos]

> Cancer kills over 9 million people per year

"Cancer" isn't one disease though, it's hundreds, and many of them require completely different approaches to treat.

> Tuberculosis kills nearly 1.5 million people per year, or 3x

So in other words, yes, it would be "worth it" to develop a vaccine for strep A. It would also be worth it to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis. Let's do both.

> Over 9 million people die from hunger related causes, which while not a disease is 18x strep A

Not really relevant. The people who have expertise in developing vaccines and the people who have expertise in "fixing hunger" are not the same people.

> the scale and the fact that it can be treated with common antibiotics means that we can put the effort and resources that would be spent on a vaccine to better use elsewhere

That's not a good way to evaluate where to put resources. To borrow your example, maybe it will take 10x more time and 5x the cost to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis vs. strep A. Then working on strep A sounds like a good allocation of resources.

Just offering that as an example; I of course don't know the relative resource requirements here. But things are not so simple. (Though going back to your cancer example: I feel pretty safe in guessing it would take way more than 18x the resources and effort to cure all forms of cancer than to develop a strep A vaccine.)

And regardless, resources are usually not allocated in the most simple, efficient way. People work on things because they want to, and can find someone to fund them. Funders might want to fund something because they have a personal connection to the thing they're funding. Certainly government grants are given with a bit more rigor than that, but there's a lot of disease-fighting out there that comes from a variety of sources. And that's ok.

[fallous]

Nearly all hunger-related deaths are due to the political environment they live in (including wars). Of course such environments also disproportionately include those who cannot gain access to antibiotics as well.

You could argue that vaccines would be hampered by the same environmental issues, but the window of stability necessary to vaccinate a person for life is much smaller and easier than the repeated stability moments required to gain access to antibiotics in a timely fashion for those infected with Strep A.

The question of prioritization of resources is not merely dependent upon the number of those affected, the creation of an effective vaccine is unpredictable. You're better off taking a broad approach in order to maximize the likelihood of success.

[konschubert]

Considering that strep A deaths are probably 100x easier to prevent than cancer deaths, this means that’s we should focus on Strep A at least as much as on cancer.