The tragedy is when somebody's life is cut short well before their natural end for reasons that could be easily fixed / avoided if we just applied ourselves better.
That is why heart disease and malaria are two entirely different things in my opinion. Heart disease happens mostly to older people who had their entire life to make right choices but were maybe, like me, too lazy to do it, while kids who die of malaria are basically completely innocent and had no saying or influence on their situation.
It also seems fighting malaria is much easier than fighting heart disease.
Now, I agree that we could and should do better to invest more into researching how we can make advanced age more satisfying to population of the earth and this means also learning how to help with heart problems en masse and not just to people who have enough funds to get adequate care and enough intelligence to prevent large portion of the risk in the first place.
Malaria is just one of the examples. I don't say we should put everything away and just focus on it. I would like that we identified where we could spend a relatively small portion of GDP to get a lot of good. Just imagine how much good could happen if entire world spent 5 times more money on health and health-related research than on military. Would you be willing to spend 10% of your income to get better health and longer when you are old? I would, for sure.
You mean ... like 9/11?
This is like saying itβs preposterous to get obsessed with kids dying from malaria when more people die from heart disease.
You can care about more than one thing.
Not surprising the one tragedy that happened in front of our faces on national television affected us a lot.