For decades, medical researchers have raised concerns that most of their time and funding are devoted to studying diseases that afflict a minority of the global population.
A new study reports that this gap has narrowed over the past two decades, but warns that U.S. funding cuts to international aid and changing policies governing international research collaborations funded by the National Institutes of Health could jeopardize those gains.
Since 1990, researchers have bemoaned what they refer to as the 10/90 gap — that about 10% of global health funding was dedicated to conditions that cause 90% of the world’s disease burden. The imbalance was primarily driven by high-income countries that do the majority of medical research dedicating more resources to chronic diseases, and not to communicable diseases that were more common in developing countries.
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