• Question: What is your favourite disease?

    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:

      I can’t say I like any diseases. They are generally a bad thing!

      There are lots of pathogens which are grimly fascinating in their own way. I couldn’t pick which was most interesting.

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      The word “disease” does have a negative association to it, so it is hard to think of a favourite one.
      One disease causing organism that I do find very fascinating is Trypanosoma (try-pan-o-zoo-ma) brucei which causes sleeping sickness. The organism has a sugar coat, which it uses to avoid the host immune system. What makes it so amazing is that the coat varies with each new generation of Trypanosoma within the body. This means is avoids the immune system and stresses it so much that eventually it packs in and stops working, which sadly leads to the death of the individual.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      As Hannah and Peter have said, thinking of a favourite disease does seem a bit odd! I’d have to choose norovirus though, as it was the first infectious disease I worked on. Norovirus causes vomiting and diarrhoea, though tends to be self-limiting (clears up without needing treatment) in a few days. It’s very contagious though – it’s been shown that you can be infected by as few as 4 viruses, and when you vomit, you can spread billions! One of the things that interests me is why we don’t all have it when it can spread so fast, especially since no long-term immunity (resistance against the disease) has been found. Whilst not usually fatal, norovirus costs the NHS around £110 million a year, so understanding how outbreaks occur and spread is still really important.

    • Photo: Keith Grehan

      Keith Grehan answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      I will start by agreeing with the others that diseases are normally not a good thing and so it feels weird talking about my favorite. However I have to admit that one of the main reasons I decided to study virology was because I was interested in the Ebola virus. I think what appeals to me about the virus is that it was so mysterious and more than a little scary. For more than 30 years some of the best virus workers in the world tried to figure out where it would strike and how to cure it and so far we still cannot cure it.
      I think the research has moved very fast in recent years and we can now have more hope than ever before that better treatments will soon be discovered.

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