There are major efforts to treat malaria, for example. Bill Gates is putting in billions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-malaria-summit/glo...
There’s this great effort too:
https://malariaelimination8.org
I’ve even donated money for nets myself.
Part of the problem isn’t money but changing attitudes. A lot of nets, for example, end up being used for fishing.
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/mosquito-nets-widely-u...
On the other hand, aging is unique in that solving it (or even just pushing it back a bit) gives multiplicative effects to productivity against any problem that requires decades of expertise, because it lets researchers have more productive decades and/or spend more years learning to be productive and yet still spend just as many years being productive. Malaria, at this point, isn’t quite the type of problem this would help—but there certainly are many problems where more grabbing out more productive researcher man-years from the aether would be extremely helpful.
It’s rather interesting to think in these terms: trying to figure out which advance will have “unblocked the tech tree” the most 50 years down the line. I rarely see this kind of analysis being done, though, which I find disappointing; surely there are people far better equipped than I to do it.
Consider all the problems you need to solve to “cure death”.
The US GDP is $17 trillion. If people starting spending billions on a more youthful old age, we’d get more research. More venture capital would go to aging research.
Probably not for most problems, but even ignoring the QALY calculations, pathogenic diseases (like malaria) are kind of unique amongst the landscape of global issues right now, in that you can actually permanently solve them with some level of attention, at which point they no longer require any donations but continue to provide benefits forevermore.
Polio is just... gone. We don't need to fight it any more. But that's only true because we (or rather, our governments) spent a whole lot of money over a very short period. If they had spread that money out over a longer period (equivalent to what would happen if fewer people were donating), polio would still be here, and not just because we "killed it slower"—it would still be thriving, because it was only being fought with half-measures. If someone only has enough money to pay for half a course of antibiotics, they may as well not take any.
Pathogens are the best justification we have for "focus firing" public resources toward a single goal. It really is a case of "we should be spending money on nothing else until we've solved this." (At least, if we're bothering to spend any money on the problem at all. 100% or 0%, but don't bother in between.)
Once we run out of "easily"-eradicable pathogens, though, the calculus of comparative advantage resumes, and it makes sense again to donate to a variety of things.