• Question: What’s the best way to get rid of a disease?

    Asked by anon-256843 on 17 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Janmarco, if it is an infectious disease then certainly vaccination is the key. If the whole population is vaccinated then the infectious agent simply cannot get through and we get properly rid of it… like measles. If it is a disease caused by environmental factors, then efforts can be made to remove factors in the environment that are responsible for a particular disease. If it is a habit, like smoking that is well known to cause lung cancer, then efforts are made to raise awareness in the public and help people leave the habit.

    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      Vaccination is key to controlling or eradicating a disease, particularly if it’s infectious! Whereas drugs are for treating people after they’ve been infected, vaccines are for stopping people getting the disease in the first place. Prevention is always better than cure! Vaccines work by ‘training’ the immune response to be stronger and quicker if you get exposed to the virus, so if you vaccinate enough people, the virus won’t have any hosts to infect any more and will eventually die out – that’s exactly what happened with Smallpox and now we’ve got rid of the disease entirely!

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