As an aside because I'm pedantic about the language, apostrophes are never used to show pluralism.
Mind your p's and q's.
Source: Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, section 6.82. Also see section 6.77: Tim had had enough of her "maybe's."
If we're trying to figure out what the most benefit for each taxpayer dollar is, then a rare disease won't win out over, say, cancer research.
Someone may consider researching a rare disease as "waste," even though to everyone including the previous poster who is a widow because of HD, it is far from a waste.
When there is not much of a profit motive to do something - whether going to the moon or fighting a rare disease - public money is the best way to do it. And even throwing a fairly small percentage at it can create big achievements.
And that's one reason I'd like to see how much money and time went into this. We might be surprised that it's fairly small in the grand scheme of biomedical research costs!
in Dutch they are for some words, e.g., 1 ski, 2 ski's. i have no idea how that arose historically.