More diseases eradicated

TxCoatl1970

Pick from the pack

There's several reasons more diseases aren't eradicated a la smallpox.
IMO there's three reasons:
  • technical- wiping out malaria is very difficult w vaccines as the plasmodium protozoa is really good at altering its profile. It's the repeated cycles of the microbe infecting, changing forms, breaking out and the immune system sweeping them up that wears out the victim.
    Smallpox OTOH as an orthopox virus was close enough to cowpox so that infection with cowpox protected people from further infection with variola (smallpox).
  • moral- syphilis and gonorrhea should have vaccines, but they're venereal diseases and not given the $$$ and effort to eradicate them as we would other diseases. Also we over-relied on antibiotics
  • social- since the collapse of the Cold War- nobody's interested in eradicating diseases globally with quite the same urgency.

I could go into conspiracy-land about how Big Pharma may/may not be pushing vaccines as hard as 1950-1980 b/c they're not quite the profit center that treatments are. YMMV.

Also from 1950-1980- the big four antibiotics were supposed to eradicate bacterial disease until we found out bacteria adapt incredibly fast via plasmid exchange, transformation, and quick reproduction rate to render antibiotic therapies ineffectual much quicker than anyone anticipated.

Irrationality is also a factor- in the States there's also a massive anti-vaccine movement convinced that vaccines are behind autism which has prevented parents from vaccinating their kids against common and preventable diseases.

Thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative) has been bandied about as the culprit , as well as possible epigenetic effects of lysogenic viral infections but studies to evaluate those haven't really convinced the medical and scientific bodies that those factors are statistically significant causes of autism.

Personally, I think the risks of kids getting whooping cough and dying trump a 1% chance of autism but we live in as close to a zero-tolerable risk culture as far as that goes that stifles innovation.
 

TxCoatl1970

Rabies is a tough nut to crack

Rabies is very difficult to immunize against with a HUGE vulnerable population, (pretty much every land mammal).
However, getting rid of rinderpest, which is much easier to transmit shows it CAN be done.

According to wiki- Australia, NZ, Japan, UK seemed to have completely eradicated it, as well as Norway.

With viruses, finding the reservoir animal populations and immunizing them is the key to stopping epidemics before they start. Immunizing domestic dogs so that wild bats can't get infected and spread the disease among various species is key to making rabies so rare it extinguishes.

As with many things we're capable of doing so many things for good or ill.
It's a question of finding the right strategy and application of resources to make them happen.
Broken down even further-
Can we do so? Should we do so? Will we do so? If all three elements are in place, it'll happen.

We've hit the first stage, now it's just convincing folks we should do so and keep going til we finish the job.
 
metastasis_d

metastasis_d

TxCoatl1970 said:
According to wiki- Australia, NZ, Japan, UK seemed to have completely eradicated it, as well as Norway.
Click to expand...

Those countries make sense-I would think islands are easier to eliminate rabies from than states that border a country that hasn't eradicated it-but what about say Chile and Uruguay?
 
The Kiat

The Kiat

Malaria isn't so easy to get rid of. You can't just wipe out the misquito, since they are pollinaters as well as blood drinkers. Don't just the females bite, and only when they are producing eggs?

Diseases that are in serious need of eradication include: ALS, Alzheimers, and HIV. I picked these because I really don't like the diseases that take forever to kill. The victims get to live for years knowing of their impending doom and get to waste away in all that time. Old-timer's is the worse, because it makes those around the victim suffer more than the other two would. I have such a low opinion of these diseases that if I had a cure, I'd just give it away. All cure at no charge.
 

Strategos' Risk

Certainly, but those three diseases don't have cures yet. We're talking about diseases that we have cures for, but for whatever reason haven't eradicated yet.

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems like Rinderpest is at a better state than we thought

On 14 October 2010, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization announced that field activities in the decades-long, worldwide campaign to eradicate the disease were ending, paving the way for a formal declaration in June 2011 of the global eradication of rinderpest.[3] On 25 May 2011, the World Organisation for Animal Health announced the free status of the last eight countries not yet recognized, and said a total of 198 countries were now free of the disease.[4] On 8 August 2011, the United Nations held a ceremony declaring the disease eradicated, making Rinderpest only the second disease in history to be fully wiped out, following smallpox.[
Click to expand...

Yay!
 

vasp

Polio is close to be eradicated. It's only left in four countries last i checked. Nigeria,India,pakistan and Afganistan.
 

carpediem

Polio is almost gone in human populations; its last bastions are places where some dim f*** (forgive the Saxon, but in this case I believe it justified) spread the rumour that the vaccine is a Western plot to cause infertility, or some-such nonsense. I doubt it can ever be fully eradicated, as it is an epizootic, hence has a pool of potential innoculum in wild animals; we will probably need to keep a very close eye on it for a long time.

Dracunculiasis medinensis: the Guinea Worm (nasty little thing) is probably the next thing on the list of diseases to be eradicated; it has a lifespan of a year. All that is necessary to break the lifecycle will be a year of nobody ingesting it or shedding it into watersources. Eduaction and proper, if primative, medical care are seeing to that.

Personally I'd like to see Screw-worm, Chagas and Malaria gone; the latter two because they kill so many, the former for just being an un-holy affront to all living things.
 

Simreeve

Scarlet Fever used to be a real killer, but the version of it that exists nowadays is much less lethal. Apparently the causative agent has simply undergone natural selection in favour of strains that keep their hosts around for longer...
 

jamsodonnell

There are a couple of other disease that should be eradicated well within the lifetime of most AH members including yaws which is disfiguring but not generally life threatening. While the number of cases has plummeted the problem seems to be given relatively low priority in a number of countries where it still exists.
 
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