• Question: do you think there will be a day when all diseases will be curable?

    Asked by daviesl3 to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Hi daviesl3,

      It is quite difficult to predict when and if it is possible to cure all the diseases.
      But one thing is for sure, we are making lot of progress. And very quickly. Thanks to Science and Technology and yes Engineering!

      If you think of how much ‘on an average person use to live’. Average life span has almost doubled, and this is all due to scientific progress.
      But another thing, our ancestors use to live in the forests and many of us now live in cities.
      Our life styles have changed quite a lot, because of these changes we are exposed to new type of diseases. For example heart disease could occur because of less exercise and eating fatty food.

      So we might find cure on old diseases but there always will be something which we have not understood and which is new.

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Excellent question daviesI3 and it was good to chat with you and your colleagues today!

      Yes I do believe there will be a day when we will have a cure for all known diseases, including cancer.

      I also believe we will be able to determine the cause of any new diseases in the future, so we will can eliminate those as well. 🙂

    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I’d like to think so, but I’m not sure.
      People live longer and longer because of the progress we keep making in medicine. That means that new illnesses are appearing that we now need to tackle. If you think of a couple of hundred years ago (or maybe even more recently) we weren’t as concerned about things like Parkinsons, because people would often die before that from other diseases. Now it is a big issue because we can cure a lot of the other diseases.
      Having said that, we are definitely making progress all the time.

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I hope so, but all diseases – that is a lot of diseases to cure! Also, as we create cures for diseases, for example viruses, these viruses mutate to become resistant to our medicines. This is a REALLY big problem right now for bacteria that are becoming resistant to our antibiotics (http://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/drtb/default.htm). Viruses especially mutate very fast because they don’t have enzymes that our own cells have to slow down mutations from happening. It is very hard to say whether we could create drugs or some other type of treatment that would fend off all disease forever… but science is here to try!

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      I think we’re finding out more and more about illness and disease every day so we are gettign closer, unfortunately there are more and more diseases being created at the same time. Diseases have a nasty habit of mutating to become resistant to different types of cure. Viruses could be thought of as another form of life trying to survive in the world. The more we try to destroy them, the more they try to fight to stay alive, and so they mutate. This means we then have to come up with another cure to deal with the new strain.
      There have been some successes where viruses have been eradicated, such as smallpox in the 1970s through a worldwide vaccination program. This has been responsible for saving millions of lives, however there are still many diseases out there to cause us problems for many years to come.

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