I made a few approximate calculations to estimate the importance of finding effective cures for cancer.
These are very rough estimates based on uncertain data, but definitely help understanding what we're trying to do and the importance of it.
I compared cancer with another disease: malaria.
There's no particular reason as to why I chose malaria, other that it's quite a widespread disease that causes a lot of troubles in certain places.
At the end of the toot I link all the sources I used, so that you can replicate the calculations if you wish; if you're going to do that maybe search for some better data, I didn't do any extensive research.
All data is referred to 2019, so we can exclude any effects due to covid limiting access to cures.
The cancer mortality rate changes with age, most people who die of cancer have more than 70 years.
Cancer deaths under 14 years: 0.40% of the total
Malaria deaths under 14 years: 56.81% of the total
Cancer total deaths: 10 million
Malaria total deaths: 558,000
Cancer deaths under 14: 40,000
Malaria deaths under 14: 317,000
So, as you can see cancer kills many more people than malaria, almost 18 times as many; however most of those people have more than 70 years and the global life expectancy is 73 years, thus it is not decreasing the length of life of people significantly.
Malaria kills much less people, however most of the people who die of malaria are children below 5 year, thus malaria kills most of the people 65 years before they would be expected to die.
Even though malaria kills less people than cancer overall, it kills almost 8 times more children below 14 than cancer.
I believe this rush in investing to find a cure for cancer to be stupid.
It would be nice to find a cure for cancer, but I believe there are more important diseases to cure in the world.
Unfortunately, most of the money and even public research is focused on cancer and not other critical diseases.
Sources:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malaria-death-rates-by-age?country=~OWID_WRL
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-by-age?time=latest&country=~OWID_WRL
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2787350
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
