• Question: Do you think there will one day be a world without diseases? Will this be good or can it actually be bad?

    Asked by Trinneh to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Hi there,
      I don’t think we will ever eradicate all diseases.
      For example viruses also mutate and change all the time too….so as fast as we identify vaccines and “cures” for things they change a bit. That is why even Flu is hard to beat…and some Flu’s can be really bad when they mutate, like the Spanish flu in 1918 that killed millions and infected half of the world’s population!
      So its a battle – a bit like hide and seek….but there are lots of people hiding and they are in camouflage!

    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      As far as infectious diseases, we have already got got rid of smallpox and there are several other diseases that we could potentially completely eradicate, like polio or gonorrhea (if we tried hard enough, its very hard to eradicate a disease!).

      However for a lot of infections, the bacteria or virus that causes them lives in water or soil or in many other animal species and so we could probably never eradicate them completely. Also, a lot of the infections we get are from our own good bacteria that turn bad if we are feeling run down and even if we did try to get rid of them all, it would probably have bad effects on our own health. So yes, it could be bad and if it is a disease that also affects animals then we couldn’t predict what would happen. For some things it might still be worth it if we could, like malaria, but for others, like the bacteria that cause food poisoning, it probably wouldn’t.

    • Photo: Tora Smulders-Srinivasan

      Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      I think there will be. Like the others said, there are already some that we’ve pretty much gotten rid of.

      I think we may not completely get rid of bacteria or viruses (and we wouldn’t want to, since they do good things a lot too!) but we will be able to fight them off easily when they turn bad.

      I think it’ll be a good thing! As hopefully we’ll still always have the technology & our human bodies can still fight things off — but it would be bad if we lost those & new bad bacteria or viruses turned up!

    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      The problem is that if we get rid of every disease then if some disease did appear somehow we would have no way of fighting it off as our white blood cells may have stopped working or evolved out of us all together then we would be in big trouble.

      Also there’s loads of good bacteria and viruses in our bodies that would make us really sick if we got rid of them.

Comments