Why should we fight disease?

Great Debates
1

Ok ok hear me out… I recently read an article about diseases (like AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases that leave one sterile) that developed from god-knows-where and can only be spread from person to person(a.k.a. you can’t get it unless someone else gives it to you)… the basic gist of the article was that when all the people who carry the disease die, the disease will die with it. The question of the article was concerning whether we should even be spending money on diseases like these when the money would be better serving mankind by developing drugs for diseases that strike without being spread so obviously (like cancer, or heart disease).

I was just wondering what the faithful dopers thought about this…

Personally I see the point… but I think I’m just prejudiced against people with AIDS; I have nothing against being gay, I just think that there’s too much education out there about it now to be able to excuse/justify so many people catching it.

2

Why do anything? You’re going to die anyway, why not go now?

Hmm. Nope. Thanks, though. I don’t think people deserve to die of disease without a fight, regardless of what mistakes they might have made.

3

Ehm - there appears to be a hole in the logic, here. If someone who carries the disease passes it on before dying, the disease does not die out.

But the simple answer is this: We should fight disease because it kills us.

S. Norman

4

With that logic…
Heart disease: your own fault for not eating right and exercising
Cancer: shouldn’t have smoked, sniffed glue, eaten fake sugar, been around power lines…

5

If you make a cure to aids or a treatment you can make bags of cash, so drug companies are trying to er… make bags of cash.

About 1/20th of the population are actually imune to aids BUT do you really just want to sit back and see 19/20ths die ?

Humans fight to change their environment and trying to make a cure for a disease has the same purpose as lighting a fire or drinking a bud - it makes us feel better.

well thats my idea anyway… perhaps the drug companies think a cure to aids would be more easier to find / profit from than cancer, they have been trying to cure cancer for years.

6

Maybe some people actually have genuine concern that others don’t suffer if they have the ability to stop it.

7

Dude, do you know of any recent studies on that?

8

I’d be interested to know whether the article was referring to all infectious diseases, like measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, meningitis, etc., or just to sexually transmitted diseases.

Like Norman already pointed out, this–

–ignores a basic fact of infectious disease pathology, which is that you can be contagious for days, even weeks, before you know you have the disease, during which time you spread it to everyone around you. Chicken pox has an incubation period of about 3 weeks, IIRC, during which time the kid who eventually breaks out in spots has already exposed everyone in his pre-school to it.

Typhoid, of course, you can have for years and never get sick yourself.

The author of the article evidently thinks we should just let people suffer and be sick and eventually die? Isn’t that rather a large step backwards in time about a hundred years? If we did stop fighting infectious diseases and simply “let 'em come”, and devoted all our resources to curing cancer and heart disease, then in about 5 or 10 years we’d suddenly find that all our cancer and heart disease research was totally beside the point, useless, since “cancer” and “heart disease” would plummet to the bottom of the mortality statistics, to be replaced by those ancient killers such as measles, rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, influenza…

See what I’m saying? People would be dying of pneumonia that set in after a bad cold long before they’d have a chance to develop heart disease. Children would be dying of whooping cough at age 2 instead of childhood leukemia at age 10.

Does this all sound like a good idea to you?

9

Andros, I would venture to suggest that Dude may be referring to this factoid:

http://www.sfaf.org/aids101/hiv_disease.html

10

NightRabbit, your idea wouldn’t work. It’s been a while, but I’ll try to give you a quick virology 101, specifically the concepts of reservoirs and burnout.

Many diseases infect other species besides humans. These are called reservoir species. Hypothetically, if we were able to vaccinate everybody for the flu we still wouldn’t be able to stamp it out like we did small pox. Influenza is carried by birds and pigs, among others, so it would just mutate in those reservoir species till it could infect us again. If a disease has a large resevoir, it’s going to pop up again and again no matter what we do. (chilling thought: Anthrax has a large resevoir in farm animals) However, AIDs most likely came from the green monkey. Not too many people have contact with that animal, so we are covered on the reservoir issue. For AIDs, it’s the slow burnout that’ll get us.

When Ebola infects a population, it spreads fast and kills within two weeks. It’s like a brush fire. It spends all it’s “fuel” too fast. People die faster than they can spread it and it burns out, which I think is the gist of your idea. Unlike Ebola, AIDs has a long incubation period. People can be spreading it for years before they even show symptoms. It burns like kingsford charcoal. Since it has already appeared in almost every population, it would take centuries to reach burnout, if it ever did.

Nope, waiting for burnout won’t work. We need vacines.

-Beeblebrox

In his dream he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights.

11

Baub wrote:

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Now now, although saccharin has been proven to cause cancer in rodents, animal tests on primates failed to replicate this result. Apparently, it’s only carcinogenic in rodents because rodents’ excretory system lacks the ability to eliminate certain chemicals which the human excretory system can eliminate.

(And don’t get me started on that whole rigamarole about carcinogenic power lines.)

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