• Question: hi when do you think there will be a cure for most dieses?

    Asked by FREDDIEFM to Carolyn, Peter, Richard, Sara, Siana on 17 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Hi Freddie,
      It’s a depressing answer but probably never. As we cure diseases, others seem to pop up. For example, we used to die of infections a lot. Since we cured a lot of these with antibiotics, we now live longer and cancer became the biggest problem. Now we’re living longer still and dementia is a big problem. 100 years ago dementia was rare cos nobody lived long enough to get it! I suspect that if we cured all known diseases tomorrow, it wouldn’t belong before a new one appeared…

    • Photo: Carolyn Nielsen

      Carolyn Nielsen answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      Hi Freddie,

      This is why we will always need scientists, to understand new diseases as they appear! There is a whole area of biology called emerging diseases that looks at this, and it’s really really interesting. This generally happens when a disease ‘jumps’ from animals to humans. This is what we think happened with HIV (from monkeys), and is what tends to cause flu pandemics like with swine flu (from pigs). We call these infections that can pass from animals to humans ‘zoonotic’, and they tend to occur when there is close contact between animals and humans, like when urbanisation expands cities into jungle environments.

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