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Comment by cauterized | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

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.

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