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Asked by 762cesf46 to Kylie, Matt, Bex, RobB, Sam on 13 Jun 2016.
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Matt Dunn answered on 13 Jun 2016:
It’s a tough question because there are so many thousands of diseases and so many hundreds of ways to treating each one!
Diseases that affect more simple areas of the body are easier to work on, so I’d say diseases that affect the bone, cartilage, fat or skin are the closest, with diseases that affect more complicated organs like the kidney, liver and brain being further away.
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Rebecca Thompson answered on 13 Jun 2016:
We have had the most luck eradicating diseases associated with viruses, by using vaccines. When someone is vaccinated, it teaches their immune system how to flight the virus, so when you get infected you flight it off straight away. Vaccines can be super effective, for example the last case of small pox (a really horrible disease) was in 1977. We successfully vaccinated enough people that the virus had no where left to go, and died out. When you think about this, thats really amazing!
There is a drive to do the same for polio, another disease caused by a virus. The trouble is, you need to vaccinate enough people across the world, this includes people in hard to reach places, like rural communities in Africa, or war torn countries. And people are being born every day, who also need to be vaccinated. So its a massive organisational problem to fully eradicate a disease caused by a virus!
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Rob Brass answered on 14 Jun 2016:
I feel I’m only really qualified to talk about cancer, otherwise I know as much as everyone else knows from the papers!
Recently there has been a big breakthrough in the treatment of breast cancer, they’ve discovered which genes are responsible and so in the future should be able to create more personalised treatment, or even prevent it occurring in the first place. Breast cancer is one of the most cancers in the world so this could be quite a significant breakthrough!
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