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Comment by rokosbasilisk | Hacker News Reader

More money is spent on preventing cancer in women in treatment, research, and preventive medicine.

Google the history of the brca gene, research and tests around it. Its quite amazing.I hope all cancer research gets the pipeline it got.

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If this is talking about a prostate vs breath cancer dichotomy. The reason is prostate cancer kills much older men than breast cancer kills women. Women in their 40s routinely die of breast cancer but that's pretty rare for a man in his 40s to die of prostate cancer.

So saving a man's live fron prostate cancer means he dies at 75 instead of 70 and but saving a women's from breast cancer means she dies at 65 instead of 45.

By this reasoning children's diseases should get even more publicity and money, and I'm aware of nothing in that area that comes even remotely close in terms of funding and awareness campaigns.

The breast cancer movement was started because at the time, male-only cancers (such as prostate and testicular cancers) were getting far more funding and research, while breast cancer was essentially being ignored despite being at least an order of magnitude more common.

That it's more common has probably made it easier to do research on once it gained sufficient visibility and funding.

Breast cancer was not an order of magnitude more common than prostate cancer:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.21332/full#c...

Prostate cancer isn't as big of an issue fatality-wise.

Right now breast cancer has a disproportionate amount of money spent on it, but I don't think comparing it to prostate cancer is fair.

Prostate cancer isn't as big of an issue fatality-wise.

Are you sure? It looks like they're both about 21 deaths per 100,000 people:

https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html

https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html

That being said, medicine is "new" technology.

We're advancing it pretty fast though.

Edit: not to mention the perception of females as a weaker sex. Socially, society is mirroring male behavior in terms of protection of females. It'll switch and balance itself out in due time. Historically I think makes died more often to work or war, females to sickness. Today these boundaries are blurring, but (socio)evolution is a patient turtle.

And yet we still have no treatment for testicular cancer other than castration -- so much for all the research.

Any facts to back that up? The story I hear more often [1] is the other way around. More men in medical studies, more often male animals in studies etc.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1761670/

The lack of inclusion of women and minorities has historically been such a problem that it is now a term and condition of many awards from HHS:

"In addition, several OPDIVs have policies concerning the inclusion of women, minorities, and children as subjects in their grant-supported research. These policies, which implement Section 492B of the PHS Act, 42 U.S.C. 289 a-2, require that women and members of minority groups and their subpopulations be included in OPDIV-supported research projects involving human subjects, unless a clear and compelling rationale and justification establishes that inclusion is inappropriate with respect to the health of the subjects, the purpose of the research, or other circumstances. When these policies apply (as specified in the funding opportunity announcement), the applicant is required to address inclusion of these groups in the application narrative, and the applicant’s plans will be assessed as part of the objective (peer) review process. Failure to comply with this policy or to adequately address use of human subjects and animals may adversely affect the score for technical merit, which may result in the OPDIV not making an award."

If you're interested in the history of cancer, I can't recommend The Emperor Of All Maladies highly enough: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003UYUP58/

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