• Question: What disease would you choose to completely eradicate? Why?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , , .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      If I could pick one infectious disease to eradicate tomorrow it would be tuberculosis (TB). It’s one of the world’s biggest killers:
      http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/

      Eradicating a disease is not easy. In the whole of human history we have only every eradicated one disease – smallpox. This was achieved because a good vaccine was available, it was easy to find infected patients because the disease was visible and smallpox only infected humans. For something like TB the vaccines are not 100% effective, the disease can be “invisible” for years after someone is infected, treatment is long and difficult and the areas where there is most disease are often the poorest.

    • Photo: Ramya Bhatia

      Ramya Bhatia answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      I would like to see a world where we are free of all diseases. But if i had to choose 1 it would be AIDS.

    • Photo: Keith Grehan

      Keith Grehan answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I think I would try to get rid of malaria. It is a huge problem and kills around 500,000 people each year, the most tragic part is that many of these deaths are preventable as we have really effective treatments. Malaria medication is expensive though so in many parts of the world people simply don’t have access to it and so each day people risk infection.
      Malaria also affects children worst of all with the highest death rates in children under 5, I think this is one of the worst examples today of inequality in our world as everyone should have access to anti-malaria medication.
      If I could have a magic wand today I would wipe out Malaria.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      The other scientists have all put forward really great suggests as diseases to eradicate. I’m going to expand on Ramya’s answer a little bit, as AIDs (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) is really just the name of the late stages of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) which I’ve just started working on. HIV was only discovered in 1981, but is thought to affect around 35 million people across the world. The virus attaches to the cells of your immune system, eventually causing them to not being able to respond to other infection. Then other ‘opportunistic’ diseases, such as tuberculosis, have free rein as there’s no immune system to battle them – and that’s what causes the fatalities, rather than the HIV itself.

      Currently, there isn’t a cure for HIV, but there are treatments that help people live normally. One of the most important things is diagnosing people early – so they can help limit onwards transmission, and get treatment that will decrease the chance of it turning into AIDs.

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