As you probably know, thanks to some sterling work humanity managed to wipe out smallpox by 1979 and by 2011 we got rid of rinderpest, which mostly infected cattle.
What diseases are destined to be consigned to the history books? I’d heard that thanks to worldwide vaccination we were getting pretty damn close to getting rid of polio (obligatory Good guy Jonas Salk link) but it’s had an unfortunate resurgence in Syria recently.
Guinea worm will probably be extinct by 2020, and good riddance to it.
Peste des Petits Ruminants, PPR, is another possible disease. Similar to Rinderpest, but affecting both goats and sheep. There are eradication efforts going on in Africa.
You know both Rindperest and PPR are morbilliviruses… same as measles, which was on its way to becoming more and more rare.
Polio would probably already be eradicated if it weren’t for, well, politics. The main areas where it’s still endemic (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Nigeria) all have Islamic fundamentalist groups who strongly oppose anything seen as being Western, including vaccinations.
Attacks on medical personnel are all too common in Nigeria and the others have regions that medical personnel can’t get to safely.
It turns out it’s man.
Nitpick: Guinea Worm is horrible, and I’ll be glad to hear of its demise, but it’s not really an infectious disease (or at least it would be a very liberal interpretation of both words)
Really? I’d never heard of guinea worm before this thread, and so looked it up. It seems that pretty much every reference I’ve found so far, from Wikipedia to medical journal articles to the World Health Organization, call it both a “disease” and “infectious”.
Hmmmm… I’d still say that’s a very liberal interpretation of the terms - especially ‘infectious’ - which most usually indicates something that humans can catch directly from one another (i.e. synonymous with ‘contagious’)
Maybe it’s just me, but it doesn’t seem right to say that you get ‘infected’ by a macroscopic, multicellular parasite.
Although used interchangeably in laymen’s language, infection and contagion are not exact synonyms in their technical senses. An infection is the invasion of the body by organisms capable of causing disease. Contagion is a subset of infection: infection as a result of close contact with a previously infected person or animal.
Measles was well on the way to being wiped out, and isn’t for the same reasons.
The eradication of this disease is one of Jimmy Carter’s biggest projects in recent years. It only exists in equatorial areas, because the worm itself dies when exposed to cold.
Tricky terms. Lyme Disease (Borreliosis) is an infectious disease, but ticks are an intermediate host.
I think the distinction he’s making there is that something like Lyme Disease is bacterial, while a Guinea worm is a parasitic nematode. I don’t have a problem saying “infected with Guinea worms”, but I can see why he draws the distinction.
Agree. Just thinking of other non-classical infectious diseases.
I think I’m actually going to back down on this point. To my mind, there was always some kind of boundary between infection and infestation- probably dependent on whether you can (or could) see the organism with the naked eye (so bacteria, viruses, protozoans, amoebae, even microscopic worms, mites and larvae) would infect. Anything bigger trying to eat you would be some other kind of attack - infestation or (on a larger scale again) predation.
(I mean, nobody was ever infected with tigers).
But it seems like the medical profession is quite happy to use the term infection for bigger stuff (including tapeworms, for example). So I retract my nitpick above. The terms are not as exact as I thought.
The list of diseases eradicated by man seems a bit thin to me. Politics and ignorance do seem to get in the way. With the amount of resources currently involved in big Pharma, and current medicine and technology, I would have thought we’d be closer on a few more. How did we manage to do it with smallpox?
I think another question is IF we will ever eradicate another (guinea worm notwithstanding).
Mass vaccinations, in some situations mandatory and forced.
Nobody that survived to tell the tale, anyway.
Malaria? Bill and Melinda are working on it.
And rinderpest was mostly eradicated via culling infected livestock, with some vaccination used as well. So we’re kind of limited in our options here.