The perspective of medical history:
It's been over a year since my last post. I guess it's about time.
My work puts me in daily contact with quite a number of groups doing medical research at a university. Because of that, I often have a little different viewpoint on disease than many. In this era of medical miracles, it's easy to forget just how terribly difficult and hard won our victories against disease are.
I was walking over to the Illini Union and on the second floor balcony was a banner saying: "HIV. 30 years and still not gone.".
I certainly don't make light of a disease that's killed and sickened people I know, and devastated much of southern Africa (among other regions).
But, the speed of advance against the disease, when compared to many others has been astoundingly rapid.
We've gone from it being a short term (a few years at most) death sentence to being a disease that can be managed in many individuals, admittedly with great difficulty and cost. Our attempts at a vaccine have thus far not been very successful and the virus is a tricky one that seems to elude our best tricks. Programs in many parts of the world have reduced the rate of spread greatly. I've worked with a lot of people who've put in very long hours trying to understand the virus and research on it is funded highly.
For a comparison, how does this stack up against other diseases that kill large numbers of people?
Bubonic Plague. 1470 years and still not gone.
Tuberculosis. At least 5000 years and still not gone.
Malaria. At least 10,000 years and still not gone.
Influenza. All of human history and prehistory (estimated) and still not gone.
And the first three are either bacteria or parasites. They are the sort of organisms that we've had great success in dealing with for other diseases. The last is a virus but one we have at least some ability to predict strains and vaccinate for.
HIV is also a virus so most of our pharmacological weapons don't work against it. Like malaria, it's a tricky disease that vaccines come up short against.
So, although it often is disheartening to hear about HIV or other recently emerging diseases still killing us, when looked at in comparison to others, the history is a fairly bright one. And, with the incredibly more effective research tools that are coming online (cheap, fast sequencing, FT mass spectrometry that lets a soup of proteins be identified and quantified so rapidly it would have been a scifi dream in the 1990s when I was directly involved) I expect the advance to get even quicker.
My work puts me in daily contact with quite a number of groups doing medical research at a university. Because of that, I often have a little different viewpoint on disease than many. In this era of medical miracles, it's easy to forget just how terribly difficult and hard won our victories against disease are.
I was walking over to the Illini Union and on the second floor balcony was a banner saying: "HIV. 30 years and still not gone.".
I certainly don't make light of a disease that's killed and sickened people I know, and devastated much of southern Africa (among other regions).
But, the speed of advance against the disease, when compared to many others has been astoundingly rapid.
We've gone from it being a short term (a few years at most) death sentence to being a disease that can be managed in many individuals, admittedly with great difficulty and cost. Our attempts at a vaccine have thus far not been very successful and the virus is a tricky one that seems to elude our best tricks. Programs in many parts of the world have reduced the rate of spread greatly. I've worked with a lot of people who've put in very long hours trying to understand the virus and research on it is funded highly.
For a comparison, how does this stack up against other diseases that kill large numbers of people?
Bubonic Plague. 1470 years and still not gone.
Tuberculosis. At least 5000 years and still not gone.
Malaria. At least 10,000 years and still not gone.
Influenza. All of human history and prehistory (estimated) and still not gone.
And the first three are either bacteria or parasites. They are the sort of organisms that we've had great success in dealing with for other diseases. The last is a virus but one we have at least some ability to predict strains and vaccinate for.
HIV is also a virus so most of our pharmacological weapons don't work against it. Like malaria, it's a tricky disease that vaccines come up short against.
So, although it often is disheartening to hear about HIV or other recently emerging diseases still killing us, when looked at in comparison to others, the history is a fairly bright one. And, with the incredibly more effective research tools that are coming online (cheap, fast sequencing, FT mass spectrometry that lets a soup of proteins be identified and quantified so rapidly it would have been a scifi dream in the 1990s when I was directly involved) I expect the advance to get even quicker.