Lifting people out of poverty is pretty important. The biggest bang for the buck in "curing diseases" is getting more out of the cures we already have. Just bec

Lifting people out of poverty is pretty important. The biggest bang for the buck in "curing diseases" is getting more out of the cures we already have. Just because malaria is old news in the USA doesn't mean that it doesn't kill 1.5 to 3 million children per year. Remember, also, that a side effect of technological progress is complacency. These days we don't applaud when medical geniuses cure the pandemic flu within less than nine months of the first US case (have you noticed that there's an H1N1 vaccine now?); instead we complain that it wasn't cured far enough in advance. Or we allow statistically ignorant people to start moral panics about rare or nonexistent side effects of the new cure.