• Question: are all diseases curable ?

    Asked by hollysciencekid to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 13 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      There is a theory that the rainforests contain natural remedies to all diseases and that by deforesting them we are destroying some of these cures forever! In truth, you can never know if all diseases can be cured until they are all cured and then what about the illnesses you haven’t discovered yet?

    • Photo: Nicola Rogers

      Nicola Rogers answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      This is a difficult question – a lot of diseases that we can’t cure yet are because we don’t understand enough about the disease itself. I guess if you think long enough there is always a solution to a problem, but whether or not it can be translated for application to a patient is a different matter – which depends on the cost and time it takes to do it

    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      I don’t know. Some we can cure now, some we can’t. Some we have learned to cure, others we need to think very carefully about the ethics of the methods that exist but we don’t like to use (stem cells are the current hot topic for debate) There will always be more diseases evolving just as we evolve to kill them – look at MRSA.

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