The fact that these two diseases are not going to kill us leads me to believe that research into the causes and ultimately the cures for these diseases are not taken too seriously. It would be very interesting, if data is available, to know how many people suffer from these diseases and how many working hours are lost because of the associated problems.
I believe that the overall cost to EU nations is quite considerable and therefore would like to see the users of this site organise a petition to lobby the EU to set up a central facility in Europe, to look into the causes and ultimately find a cure. If the right technicians and doctors are selected the costs would not need to be exorbitant and would be recouped very quickly if a successful cure is found.

I did a 'back of the envelope' calculation for the cost of DC treatment in the UK and came up with a number of about £110 million per annum cost of surgery and time off work for the ~16,000 operations in the UK per year. This is certainly enough to justify funding further research into DC treatments.

There was also a paper by Hindocha et Al. presented at the recent Dupuytren's Symposium on the costs in the North East of England: http://www.dupuytrensymposium.com/Abstracts/Hindocha_1.pdf which again could be useful in justifying research.