is a misleading statement. It does not necessarily mean that each person who died from cancer was elderly and would have only lived 15 more years.
Of course not. It's an average. But HIV not only claims more years of life per patient, it's often passed on to children.
And just to clarify, I'm not arguing against cancer funding or that funds should be reallocated from cancer to HIV. This argument is an idle exercise over the top 25 questions in science, and I'd certainly hope that science as a whole is looking into a lot more than 25. We're a big enough country to walk and chew gum at the same time.
As I and others and you have stated, HIV is spread through behavioral choices resulting in the transmission of bodily fluids. Those who have it and those likely to get it, regardless of the ostensibly alarming numbers you quote, is a finite number in that it is limited to those who engage in the "risky" behaviors (unprotected sex, intravenous drug use). The unfortunate numbers of those infected who do not engage in those behaviors (the victims of deceit in sexual relationships, rape, recipients of infected transfusions) is very small.
Your original post made the point of wanting to find a vaccine for HIV for "Darwinian" reasons. Well, for purely cold, "Darwinian" reasons, the race would be better off without the numbers who are willfully spreading HIV. How has this risky behavior and its consequences benefited society or the human race? It hasn't. It is purely destructive.
In North America. The journal's stated issue was human questions, not American questions. In Africa, the only way to avoid "risky behavior" is to avoid unprotected sex with anyone, ever. I don't think I need to explain why that is selected against. If the alternative to death is celibacy, it amounts to the same thing after a generation.
But the above is not an argument that I would like to make. My goal is to eliminate the greatest suffering from the greatest number of people. To me, cancer strikes those who may have lived the "perfectly healthy" life, whatever that may be. HIV tends to strike those who are largely aware of the risks, who make a choice to engage in a behavior.
If you subtract smokers and sunbathers, who knowingly engage in risky behavior, from the rolls of "innocent" cancer patients, I'd wager that there are more "innocents" with HIV than cancer worldwide.
To me, our time and finances, our scientific and medicinal effort has a greater worldwide and generational benefit by being spent on finding a cure/vaccine for cancer than for HIV.
I disagree, primarily because HIV is infectious and cancer isn't. AIDS in this country hasn't lived up to the most dire predictions from the '80s, in part because educational efforts have been fairly successful, and in part because it entered the US in insular pockets of the population, and has remained mostly contained.
But when 25 million people on one continent are carriers of a virus that mutates rapidly, there's a potential pandemic waiting to happen. That's 25 million walking petri dishes that could form a variant that spreads through casual or semi-casual (think mono) contact. Even without that mutation, it's whistling past the graveyard to believe that an infectious agent that is endemic on one continent will stay more or less contained there.
I believe it is this qualitative issue where you and I disagree. So be it.
Fair enough, and I thank you for presenting well-thought-out and civil arguments.