Prostate cancer research underfunded.

Madam_X wrote: »

And you also get the hostile "Women are cuntts, they've got it way better" attitude on these type threads (see quote above yours), often the sole reason for them being started.

Male suffering is more socially palatable than female (and children's). Always was and always will be which is why women and children were first to board lifeboats for example and I fail to see how making such an observation is suggestive of a someone harbouring the opinion that "woman are c**ts".

But yeh, fuk anyone hoping things might improve for women internationally in 2013 and maybe a few less rapes in their daily lives.

Can you link to where a user intimated the above attitude with regards to those people?

The King of Moo wrote: »

Yes: the logic behind this has already been explained. The greater openness in discussion of breast cancer, for example, means there is greater public awareness of it and its frequency and dangers, and more people are willing to fundraise for it and donate towards charities which seek to fight it. There is also greater awareness of it and influence on those in government who make funding decisions. There's no sexism involved.

It should not make one iota of difference to any governmental body (either here or elsewhere) whether there is awareness of the fatality rate of a particular disease or not, when issuing funding for research. The fact is that governmental bodies are more than aware of the fatality numbers involved here and that is all that should matter. Hell, spend the money on awareness of the illness if it's felt it is needed but please don't try and excuse the disproportionate amount of money that funds one (almost equally fatal cancer) over the other just because the sufferers of one of them are more open about it, as that would be one twisted attempt at justification.

It's a pretty poor article really. The only interesting point it raises is that there's a broad tendency to blame lung-cancer sufferers for their illness, which is a very obvious point which anyone could guess is true. It then attempts to suggest there's a class bias in the lack of funding for lung cancer, without any evidence to back that up.
It doesn't have anything to say about prostrate cancer or sexism.

Well, it doesn't if you're purposefully missing the broader points made in the article and I suggest a trip to specsavers if you think prostate cancer wasn't mentioned the article and also very clearly eluded to before that:

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a cancer hierarchy has been created, where breast cancer is seen as something we can all talk about and wear ribbons for and publicly lament over, whereas other cancers – in particular lung cancer – are viewed as dirty, shameful diseases undeserving of public sympathy or research funding.

There were more new cases of both lung cancer and prostate cancer in 2010 than there were of breast cancer. And yet breast cancer received more research funding from America's National Cancer Institute than those other two cancers combined.

This issue has of course been going on for many years now and back in the 1980s, it was feminists in fact who were suggesting "sexism bias" in medicine and here is a snippet from an article written to address that myth at the time:

Sex Bias Myth by Andrew G. Kadar.

As for breast cancer, the second most lethal malignancy in females, investigation in that field has long received more funding from the National Cancer Institute than any other tumor research, though lung cancer heads the list of fatal tumors for both sexes. The second most lethal malignancy in males is also a sex-specific tumor: prostate cancer. Last year approximately 46,000 women succumbed to breast cancer and 35,000 men to prostate cancer; the NCI spent $213.7 million on breast-cancer research and $51.1 million on study of the prostate.

Thus although about a third more women died of breast cancer than men of prostate cancer, breast-cancer research received more than four times the funding. More than three times as much money per fatality was spent on the women's disease. Breast cancer accounted for 8.8 percent of cancer fatalities in the United States and for 13 percent of the NCI research budget; the corresponding figures for prostate cancer were 6.7 percent of fatalities and three percent of the funding. The spending for breast-cancer research is projected to increase by 23 percent this year, to $262.9 million; prostate-research spending will increase by 7.6 percent, to $55 million.

The female cancers of the cervix and the uterus accounted for 10,100 deaths and $48.5 million in research last year, and ovarian cancer accounted for 13,300 deaths and $32.5 million in research. Thus the research funding for all female-specific cancers is substantially larger per fatality than the funding for prostate cancer.

The suggestion that men themselves are to blame here, for an illness that they sufferer from getting a fraction of research and awareness funding (compared with what similarly fatal cancers have spent on it) just because they don't go to their doctors as often and are more reserved perhaps about discussing symptoms associated with that particular part of the body is quite frankly, absurd. As indeed are the suggestions that all would be balanced if men just went out and did something about the glaring disproportions themselves. As if somehow society was out there more than willing to welcome and listen to men that feel they might have got the short end of a stick. Willing to give them the same level of media attention and column inches to whatever it is that their plight might be.

Well, someone should have told that to those poor buggers that climbed towers, bridges and got up on roofs in batman and spiderman costumes. As for some bizarre reason they felt they needed to do that in order to bring light on and some media attention to, some issues that they had. Seems they needn't have bothered after all and that their normal attire would have sufficed all along. Silly boys eh.