Curing Disease Are we on the verge of curing some of the worst diseases that plague the human race? Lately, there have been quite a few news releases claiming we are either near or very near to cures for diseases we never thought were possible. One of the biggest ones is a cure for cancer and another is one for aging. Will there ever be a time when cancer no longer exists? It is beginning to look like this will happen and it may not take all that much more time. Scientists are experimenting with a treatment known as immunotherapy which prods our immune system to fight off cancer much as it does other diseases. One doctor described what they were doing as supercharging the immune system. When this system was first used it was found some cancer cells share traits with healthy cell making the immune system hard to spot them, but doctors have worked on this problem. They managed to use this new system to kill cancer cells in someone who had acute lymphoblastic leukemia which some call cancer of the blood. A year after he was treated the patient was still cancer free. This regimen of treatment is being looked at with the goal of being able to use it to cure other forms of cancer and some doctors think it might be what they need. Some of the newest research has to do with human aging. This has been a pursuit of humans for thousands of years, but until now we never had the tools to do any serious research into the subject. Before now people were looking for magical cures and such. There are quite a few scientists who believe our bodies die too quickly and our life spans should be at least a couple of hundred years or more. Aging causes many other problems as we get older and makes us susceptible to many other ailments and diseases until we finally die from one of them. There is even a prize of one million dollars to the first person to retard aging. Scientists are stating they have made big advancements in this field and expect to make many more until aging is either slowed down or conquered. A chemical which is present in all living organisms is said to be able defend us against aging, but it decreases as we grow older. The chemical is known as Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). The next step is to find out the best way to increase this chemical without causing harm to the host. There is also gene research going on which could be promising. In case you think what I am talking about is a pipe dream let me tell you about life expectancies. At the beginning of the 20th century the average life expectancy was 47.3 years. A hundred years later it was 77.85 years. The increase was due in large part to cures for diseases being found. An example of this is the cure for smallpox. Many other diseases were cured, but as with all things, not everyone got the vaccinations so they were still at risk. It used to be almost all children got chickenpox, but we have just about eliminated this. Before vaccines were given, the United States experienced 11,000 cases of chicken pox every year with about 100 deaths from it. There is a long list of diseases we have cured, but there are still deadly diseases around. If we could eliminate all diseases and find a cure for aging, who knows how long we could live? There are many diseases which are still classified as incurable. Some of them are far more common than others. Take Diabetes for example. It is an incurable disease and the best one can hope for is to be able to manage it. Research has not found anything so far which would indicate it can be cured, but with computers getting more powerful and research tools being improved it is possible one day a breakthrough might take place. One disease which all of us get from time to time which has no cure is the common cold. One would think by now the riddle of how to cure it would have been solved. The reason it is so hard to find a cure is the fact the cold mutates far too fast and since it is not fatal no one has decided to try and make a vaccine for it. As of the writing of this article most genetic diseases are incurable, but progress is being made in altering genes in fetuses to avert babies being born with a genetic disease. This process is in the very early stages and it will take years for it to become common place after it is proven to work and shown not to be dangerous. I could go on and name all the incurable diseases, but there is not enough room in this article to do so. In 2016 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife started a project and announced they were going to donate 3 billion dollars over 10 years to find a cure for all diseases. The project started with the goal of looking into cures for 4 major groups of illnesses which were heart, neurological and infectious diseases along with cancer. This does seem like an impossible project however, but I guess one can hope. There are practical problems with all this. One is if people live too long our entire concept of social programs will have to change to adjust for this. What I am saying is the government is never going to start paying Social Security at 65 years of age to people with a lifespan of hundreds of years. Another problem is the corrupt system in Washington of Lobbying. None of the drug companies want to see disease disappear so they will send out truckloads of money to be given to congress. It will take a real fight to make these things happen even if we do find cures for every disease and would entail changing the way we make laws so as to avoid the influence of these companies, if that is even possible. |
