[zcid]

Why do we spend billions of dollars on a lifestyle disease instead of putting that money towards other concerns like cancer? Why does our society worry about a disease that is largely the result of poor choices over other ailments that are solely due to bad luck?

We spend far more on HIV research than any other single disease: https://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx

[VeninVidiaVicii]

Lifestyle disease? I don't think I've ever read anything more calloused. Frankly, the attitude that "you deserve to die because you had sex" is unacceptably retributive.

[jdietrich]

Globally, there are at least 36 million people living with HIV. In South Africa, nearly one in five people have HIV. Without access to antiretroviral treatment, they are living with a death sentence. Calling this virus a "lifestyle disease" is factually wrong; while infections in Western countries are mainly limited to specific groups, the virus itself does not discriminate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_...

[EamonnMR]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_disease note that cancer is on that list, and HIV is not.

[jMyles]

Your message seems, at least to me, to be quite judgmental.

I'm interested in helping people who make bad choices and people who have bad luck. It's not clear to me that one group deserves more compassion than the other.

The comparison to cancers is a bit odd - HIV is generally not regarded as a lifestyle disease, while of course many cancers do have a lifestyle component.

HIV is communicable; the time and money spent to target specific populations in an effort to reduce incidence of a communicable disease of course pays dividends in that fewer people will subsequently be infected.

And looking further down the road (albeit perhaps with optimistic glasses), with enough effort, it may be possible to eradicate it without our ever having discovered a true cure. So it makes at least some sense to work in that direction, but those efforts of course have a high cost.

[bluGill]

I find it odd that HIV is not a lifestyle disease. Everything I know about it says that someone is at zero risk if they take lifestyle precautions. Is there some risk to someone who doesn't do drugs and is in a monogamous relationship? That is they might catch it from someone near them (like the flu from a cough). Or is the definition of lifestyle disease different from what I intuitively think it is, so HIV doesn't qualify.

I'm with you on helping people who have made bad choices. However I do agree with the poster above: HIV seems to be getting an out sized share of research compared to other things that kill more people.