Did you take part in the ALS ice bucket challenge? Did you race for life? Or have you even chucked your loose change in a collection bucket to fight some other disease?
If you have, did you ever stop and wonder how many people that disease actually kills? Of course all diseases are worth fighting whether they kill 1 or 1 million people per year but as this infographic shows, the amount of money we donate to each disease does not correlate with how many people it kills each year.
For example, the disease most money was raised for in the list was breast cancer but in terms of the amount of people it kills, it’s actually 4th on the list. Heart disease kills the most people and yet that was third on the list of most money raised. In fact, if you look at the helpful coloured circles on the chart, you can see that the ‘money raised’ and ‘deaths’ columns are in completely different orders to each other.
The infographic doesn’t stipulate what causes this but the PR departments of disease charities are a possibility. Even if you didn’t take part in the ALS ice bucket challenge you probably saw some videos of them, be it friends or celebrities. A great stunt to raise awareness for ALS/motor neuron disease which raised a huge amount of money but according to the infographic, it actually causes the least amount of deaths out of all the diseases listed.
I don’t think this is a heartless infographic trying to dissuade people from donating to diseases but more raising awareness as to how much money is going towards what and letting us decide for ourselves if that should change.
Does this change how you will donate to charities raising money to fight diseases?
