Every year cancer kills 8.2 million people and is responsible for 7.6% of all deaths and ill health worldwide (measured in terms of QALYs lost). $217 billion per year is spent on cancer treatment. Malaria is responsible for 3.3% of QALYs lost worldwide. In terms of its health impacts, cancer is about twice as bad as malaria, so if medical spending were in proportion to the scale of the problem, we would expect malaria treatment to receive about $100 billion per year. In reality only $1.6 billion per year is spent on malaria treatment: about sixty times less than we would expect.
