The perspective of medical history:

[hartree]

It's been over a year since my last post. I guess it's about time

Comments

[dakhun]

Small pox: 12,000 years and we're keeping it just 'cuz

And that makes for an interesting aside:
Despite viruses being hard to kill with drugs, the only two diseases to have been eradicated from the wild are viral. So in the long run it is quite possible that more viral infections will eventually be eliminated, but bacteria will continue to prove next to impossible to eradicate completely. Bacteria can live and grow outside of a living host, but a virus needs living cells to infect. That makes viruses easier to corner and destroy. On the other hand, while there are antibiotics that are initially very effective against bacteria, they lose their effectiveness after a certain point, so antibiotics will never be able to eradicate any bacterial diseases.

[rcking]

I think a lot is going to happen in the next 50 years.

[neowolf2]

Just saw a report from Denmark about smoking and HIV. The report was that HIV positive individuals under proper care should try to quit smoking, because smoking will shorten their lives more than the HIV infection will.