Definitions
Cured means that in the US, the disease occurs/harms/kills at a rate <=10% the rate it occurred in US residents at EOY 2023 (or best available).
That is, the rate of new cases of the disease has decreased by at least 90%
OR, cases happen more often that that BUT the negative consequences can and are normally and easily solved. i.e. if it does happen, the damage done is only 10% as bad as before (by total life expectancy or total QALY impact).
For example, if we make a disease which used to cause -10 lifespan only take -2, that's not quite enough, but if we also reduce the negative QALY impact by 90%, then that is clearly enough.
Hard case: where the combined improvement is >90% but the individual QALY+expectancy numbers aren't below it. I would like to count this case as a yes but that is proportional to net damage. The point is, actual net damage reduction is what I care about.
So the point is, net total damage from the disease is down.
This includes QALY from health damage, lifespan loss, etc. but does NOT include the medical costs, or costs from having to eat food you don't like, etc.
This does need to actually happen in reality - not to just be theoretically possible. Details below.
Also note that if the cure is done pre-natally, or requires very early intervention, then for diseases which have a huge lag, such as Schizophrenia, it is hard to satisfy this requirement, because even if all newly born children do not have it, lots of people who will be in their 20s near the due date are still at risk. That would mean the claimed cure would not have arrived in time, since at no time through the due date did the actual prevalence of new diagnoses go down.
if the medical system breaks down or we lose the ability to measure what is happening, that doesn't mean the disease stopped happening. This market is about progress in medical technology / lifestyles / food etc, regarding whether people can either prevent, or very easily avoid consequences of, that disease.
Note that if the disease can be prevented technically/medically, but the population, for whatever reason, isn't coming in to get the treatment, then that will not count as a cure. The way to satisfy the claim would be for an informed medical & public policy science/math based professional to have a reasonable belief that the actual real rate and total harm of the disease, as described above, has met the threshold. So random pieces of paper which aren't reasonable to believe, even if they are endorsed by USGov, or the UN, or whoever, are not relevant, if the arbitrator of the claim doesn't accept them.
Depending on the situation, future LLMs may be used to estimate information or details to use to judge the claim.
Scoring:
The first one to meet the criteria scores 100%
The next scores 95%
etc
So, the first 20 score above zero. Once those pass, the remainder will be zero'd out.
BUT, the claim only lasts until mid 2036. At that point all still open disease answer go to ZERO (once doubts about actual state at that moment is resolved)
I will try to resolve claims as early as possible
Scope
US citizens in the US or residents with an approved status of some kind, either federal or state. So, illegal immigrants in CA count because they are in most ways treated as CA citizens. I know this is annoying but I think most stats here are reported that way.
If the US is actually invaded, the foreign armed forces soldiers do not count as residents.
Related questions
Is there a dataset we can use as our baseline, maybe OWID?
This is an important topic, but I'm afraid will be hard to resolve. A proper baseline would improve chances of correct resolutions.
My work is tangentially connected to some of the answers, but I wouldn't know how many DALYs someone loses after a breast cancer diagnosis.
@Primer thanks for your ideas. I have been thinking and hoping that resolution tools will also improve since we probably have a few years. If you know the area id also love to participate in markets made by someone more informed about how statistics work
I'm not sure how the given criteria would apply to malaria. It was already practically eliminated in the US, before returning last summer: CDC: Malaria cases in Texas and Florida are the first U.S. spread since 2003 : NPR.
@TimothyJohnson5c16 I was thinking about that - last I heard, the anti-malarial medicines which Americans take when traveling can do quite a bit of harm, physically and psychologically. Is that still the case? If so, we could consider the 2023 level of harm the baseline and then compare to the future date's value?
@Ernie Hmm, I'm not familiar with anti-malarial drugs. But it seems like that would be difficult to evaluate objectively. The CDC lists several different options with different pros and cons: CDC - Malaria - Travelers - Choosing a Drug to Prevent Malaria.
@TimothyJohnson5c16 I've heard they can be super damaging. I wonder how many Americans get malaria or suffer harm from the drugs annually? That number in 2023 would be the baseline
What would constitute an improvement for depressive disorders beyond the current medications available? If psychedelics end up leading to widespread massive QoL improvements without necessarily tanking the occurrence rates, would that still count?
As for schizophrenia, the medication to treat it already exists and the issue is getting patients to take it + the awful side effects. If a new medication came out that had fewer side effects and drastically greater compliance, would that count as treated? Or would we have to be preventing the disease in the first place?
@Athena seems like that should count re: schizophrenia:
>OR, cases happen more often that that BUT the negative consequences can and are normally and easily solved. i.e. if it does happen, the damage done is only 10% as bad as before (by total life expectancy or total QALY impact).
@Athena Occurance rates are basically a proxy for "expected harm rates". i.e. if the disease still "occurs" often but harm is nearly nothing, then it can still be considered cured. This calculation can be tough but it covers a lot more possible outcomes.
@Ernie So let’s say that depression rates are similar, but psychedelic therapy is widespread and has a ~70% long term remission rate. Would depression resolve YES or NO? Would 90% of people have to be able to achieve near/complete remission with one of the treatments widely available?
@Athena that was the idea. That the new harm which an average person reasonably estimated they would receive, would be down by 90% from where a corresponding person would be in 2023.
So, say we got a schizophrenia vax which was massively adopted and worked to prevent only new cases. If that were shown to clearly educe new diagnosis rate to zero, then we could immediately YES, because the total marginal new harm expected from the disease was zero. People who already had it had no change, so their margin is zero. And since this reasonably is expected to continue, all previously expected new harm which newly suffering or diagnosed people would get would have gone to zero