Why does the U.S. government treat AIDS and HIV different from COPD?

"What if some other behavior cost 25 million lives?
Campaign chief says actions linked to terminal AIDS largely ignored:"

The chief of a watchdog organization working to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS has launched a campaign to demand a government investigation of – and action over – the homosexual behavior that has been linked to more than 25 million deaths over the last 30 years, likening the problem to smoking, which was blamed for 100 million deaths in the 20th century.

Although statistics on the diseases linked to homosexual activity notoriously are hard to obtain, a report from the International Journal of Epidemiology estimated from a review of the "gay" population of Vancouver, B.C., that HIV/AIDS costs homosexuals up to 20 years of their lives on average.

And the U.S. government is spending, according to a Congressional Research Services report to Congress, in the range of $20 billion a year for treatment and research, with a small fraction for prevention that, analysts explain, includes testing but largely doesn't address the behavior itself.

That's even though when another threat to lives and livelihood – cigarettes – were suspected of imposing such a cost, Washington mandated exhaustive studies, imposed draconian advertising limits, demanded warning labels and enacted outright bans in many circumstances. The studies said the behavior, smoking, could be changed. . .

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