[catlifeonmars]

> As an example, in the UK in 2013 the cost of standard TB treatment was estimated at £5,000 while the cost of treating MDR-TB was estimated to be more than 10 times greater, ranging from £50,000 to £70,000 per case.

I pulled this from Wikipedia. It does not look like TB treatment is “plenty affordable”.

If the issue is with the semantics of the word “cure” that’s not a hill I’ll die on, but can you see how knowing how to cure something and actually curing something are two vastly different things?

[alex43578]

So let’s flip things: how widespread or how cheap does something have to be for you to consider it to exist? Everyone on earth, available for $1?

To say something is “effectively nonexistent” because it’s not got literal 100% availability for the world’s populace is just weird.

[catlifeonmars]

If you told someone a cure for cancer existed but there’s literally no way they could afford it, that sounds a lot like the cure effectively doesn’t exist for that person.

So I’ll posit that the weirdness of such a statement depends entirely on your audience.

If you’re one of the people likely to be able to afford such a cure, it might sound nonsensical.

I’ll also note that I intentionally selected a term with a more narrow definition “effective existence” vs a more general term “existence”. E.g. something can be true in general but effectively false in practice.