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Asked by anon-197081 to Jennifer on 5 Mar 2019.
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Jennifer Harris answered on 5 Mar 2019:
I don’t think we’ll ever be able to cure all illnesses. Viruses for example are very good at evolving and will always provide us with novel challenges. Also as society evolves there are different challenges, for examples 20yrs ago we didn’t have antimicrobial resistance, whereas now we do.
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Comments
Fiona commented on :
Jennifer is right, viruses and bacteria that cause diseases keep changing so we need new medicines. It’s the same with cancer. Increasingly they are curable but some cancers mutate and change and need new drugs to treat them. There are also orphan diseases, a name given to a disease which affects less than 200,000 people world wide. These diseases are often neglected by pharmaceutical companies because the number of patients who will benefit from the disease is low and isn’t sustainable from a business point of view, but there are plenty of research groups who are focussing on making curing these less common diseases a reality.
Paddy commented on :
Well here is bad news – I dont think cures will be found for all diseases purely because some of the inflicted populations are not big enough or not interesting enough. As has been reported extensively elsewhere, there is also racial bias in selecting cohorts for clinical trials which means that a cure which is worked out for a particular ethnic group may not work for others. There is also the issue of business and money making if all diseases are eliminated. Disease like war is the basis of the economy unfortunately – thats what made me call it a disease-economy. Its high-time we transform this to a health-economy.