Science: What does a disease deserve?
“In the early 1990s, as the deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic marched across the United States and the world, lawmakers in Congress and top officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reached an unusual understanding: Roughly 10 percent of the NIH budget would be dedicated to fighting the devastating disease. … That special arrangement is now under fire. Health policy experts, lawmakers, and even NIH officials have wondered why, two decades after AIDS death rates began dropping dramatically in the United States, the disease still gets a lion’s share of NIH resources…” (Kaiser, 11/20).