Unite against Alzheimer’s
A national strategy to find a cure by 2050 challenges America to fight the good fight.
Alzheimer’s kills slowly — first minds, then bodies. And over the excruciating course of the disease, it claims entire families as secondary victims, draining their physical, emotional and financial reserves.
May 18, 2012 - 12:07 AM
There is so much suffering.
I believe in God and I try to live by Jesus’ teaching, but I am always so hurt to see the suffering that people have to go through. This is a terrible disease that robs a family in so many ways. But all suffering does.
Health care and the care of the Baby Boomers would put a serious hurt on our budget even if we were fiscally sound as a nation. As it is, this will be a long, hard, slow slog to greater stability and to meet the ever increasing need that comes from the inequality and inadequate structures we have in place. Neither political party has the capability to fix the problems alone and one is entrenched to fix it at the expense of the least of these and the other is entrenched to stop it from being done that way and we go on losing ground as they squabble instead of govern, posture instead of lead.
Funny how we have to compromise, reform, re-evaluate and redouble our efforts on what seems like a daily basis and government never does.
Why we accept such a dysfunctional government says more than I want to admit about us.
While I welcome news of an additional $80 million for Alzheimer’s research, I find the dollar amount far too small. Alzheimer’s already takes a tremendous toll on American society (as accurately described by the RT editorial), and it’s only going to get worse as the baby boomers enter their retirement years.
Alas, allocation of federal research dollars has been enormously distorted by politics. The government spends 7X as much on HIV/AIDS as it does on Alzheimer’s ($3.2 billion this year), while Alzheimer’s kills 8X as many people and disables a far, far larger number. Additionally, HIV/AIDS is preventable and has effective treatments available, while prevention and treatment options for Alzheimer’s essentially don’t exist. Surely more than $80 million is warranted for research here.
For more data on government mis-allocation of research funding dollars: http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm
Considering all the great love for the homosexual community in this nation, I can surely see how politics determines that more money should be spent on HIV/Aids research. It just makes so much sense.
If you look at the individual funding numbers that is more than a little misleading. Do you know that research on “Aging”, “Brain Disorders” “Clinical Research”, “clinical Trials” or “Genetics” have no bearing on Alzheimer’s? And the totals far surpass the HIV/Aids money. My guess is, you don’t but it makes it so interesting to say that politics drives the bus instead of medicine. Why should research be different than every other aspect of this nation?
BTW, it is not 80 million, that is in addition, Alzheimer’s category alone is “$529 million in FY 2013″.
http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx#legend8
“BTW, it is not 80 million, that is in addition, Alzheimer’s category alone is “$529 million in FY 2013″.
Good point.
To #3 (Sandi): Do you know that those other categories do provide funding for research into Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia? My guess is you don’t, but it suits your purposes to challenge my assumption that “politics drives the bus instead of medicine”.
And yes, I knew that the $80 million was “in addition”. That why I used the words “an additional $80 million” in my first sentence of #2. Additionally, if you take my number of $3.2 billion for HIV/AIDS research and divide by 7, you get $457 million, which agrees exactly with the figure provided by the Fair Foundation and quite closely with the NIH’s figure. Please do some math before presuming I don’t understand the numbers.