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If cancer were suddenly cured, those people would still die What's the percentage of non-EOL people that die of cancer?

WalterBright 8y ago
I don't know, but I've personally known quite a few people who died of cancer decades before their 80's, and only one in his 80's.
adrianN 8y ago
They might die in a nicer way. Dying of cancer is not very pleasant compared to falling off a horse when you're 143 and breaking your neck.
- isostatic 8y ago
  I'm assuming 75% of people aren't dying in that way (or aged 98 while making love to their fourteenth wife and losing control of the plane they're flying) I'm personally more worried about things like dementia
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Sure, I'd also rather die from cancer than from Alzheimer's, but "they'll die in a different way" is a poor argument against medical research.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      But it's an argument about where to target medical research. In the UK dementia gets 6 times less funding than cancer (88m vs 540m), despite costing over twice as much to treat [0]. Global statistics seem tricky to find. [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dementia-research-gets-13-times-less-funding-than-cancer-figures-show.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dement...
      - WalterBright 8y ago
        "Getting funding" from government sources is an entirely different game than getting funding from private sources. The former is about politics, and the latter is about making money, and what the funding is for can therefore be entirely different.
        isostatic 8y ago
        There's more money to be made from researching into baldness than curing cancer or dementia. That funding is from government and charity sources combined. (Long term treatments of course is another thing - that's why we have expensive daily tablets for malaria, but no vaccine. More profitable to charge $1/day than charge $50 for a one-off vaccine) Pfizer have pulled out of neuroscience research completely, Saracatinib (from AstraZeneca) was a failed cancer drug before someone thought "hey lets try this on dementia"

I don't know, but I've personally known quite a few people who died of cancer decades before their 80's, and only one in his 80's.

adrianN 8y ago

They might die in a nicer way. Dying of cancer is not very pleasant compared to falling off a horse when you're 143 and breaking your neck.

isostatic 8y ago
I'm assuming 75% of people aren't dying in that way (or aged 98 while making love to their fourteenth wife and losing control of the plane they're flying) I'm personally more worried about things like dementia
- adrianN 8y ago
  Sure, I'd also rather die from cancer than from Alzheimer's, but "they'll die in a different way" is a poor argument against medical research.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    But it's an argument about where to target medical research. In the UK dementia gets 6 times less funding than cancer (88m vs 540m), despite costing over twice as much to treat [0]. Global statistics seem tricky to find. [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dementia-research-gets-13-times-less-funding-than-cancer-figures-show.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dement...
    - WalterBright 8y ago
      "Getting funding" from government sources is an entirely different game than getting funding from private sources. The former is about politics, and the latter is about making money, and what the funding is for can therefore be entirely different.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        There's more money to be made from researching into baldness than curing cancer or dementia. That funding is from government and charity sources combined. (Long term treatments of course is another thing - that's why we have expensive daily tablets for malaria, but no vaccine. More profitable to charge $1/day than charge $50 for a one-off vaccine) Pfizer have pulled out of neuroscience research completely, Saracatinib (from AstraZeneca) was a failed cancer drug before someone thought "hey lets try this on dementia"