• Question: What type of diseases are the most difficult to control and kill?

    Asked by anon-256843 on 25 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 25 Jun 2020:

      There are lots of pathogens (viruses/bacteria/parasites) that can hide away inside cells, and that makes them really hard to target with vaccines or drugs. For example the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, the virus that causes HIV and the parasite that causes malaria. It’s no coincidence that we don’t have an effective vaccine for any of these, even though they’re the biggest infectious disease killers in the world! Another feature of viruses in particular that makes them difficult to control is their ability to adapt and evolve very quickly. Because they replicate so fast and generate a lot of mutations, chances are a bacteria or virus is going to pop up (by chance) that is resistant to the body’s natural immunity or a new drug that’s been developed against it. That bacteria or virus will be the one to survive and pass its superior genes on, so you get a natural selection process and your drug or vaccine becomes useless 🙁

Comments

  • Photo: Valerie

    Valerie commented on :

    In addition to what Rachel said, another class of diseases that are hard to control or prevent are those that can be classed as lifestyle diseases. These are ones that are either caused, or the risk greatly enhanced, by decisions we make in our daily lives. Like what to eat, how much to exercise…
    These can be hard to control as the cause is often quite far from the effect. Like today we know that smoking causes cancer but there are still people who smoke and there are still people who start smoking now despite knowing how addicting and adversive it is to their health.
    If you look at a lot of the leading killers in the West such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes… a lot of these are heavily or completely caused by what we eat and yet a lot of people refuse to change their diet for a wide variety of reasons. But so long as people make those choices, those diseases will not go away and we will be seeking to try and reduce the effects and prolongue how long they can live with those conditions.
    Science and medicine is, as always, only part of the answer. The other part is society, which can be both the faith they have in the science (or lack thereof as seen in anti-vaxxers) and the laws that are made to regulate it all (how is genetic information to be handled?). Science cannot be looked at in isolation.