• Question: are there any diseases that only exist for a short period the disappear for ever?

    Asked by henryjones to Clare, Mariana, Pedro, Robert, Susanne on 16 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Mariana Campos

      Mariana Campos answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      There are some diseases like chicken pox that you normally only have once in your life. This is because when you are infected your immune system produces antibodies to destroy the virus. These stay in your blood and make you resistant, so you don’t have chicken pox again.

    • Photo: Susanne Muekusch

      Susanne Muekusch answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      Hi henry,

      the spanish flu wiped out as many as an estimated 20 to 40 million people in 1918/1919. Then it disappeared- not to be seen again (up until now).

      I read a book about it, it was quite fascinating! You can read more about it here:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

    • Photo: Robert Insall

      Robert Insall answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      Henry, you are really interested in the history of diseases, aren’t you? There’s a museum and Library in the Wellcome building in London – near Euston Station – that you might like to visit. It just deals with the history of medicine.

      To answer the question – when diseases are new, people aren’t immune to them, so they spread. Once people have seen them once, they are immune, so they can’t spread any more; most diseases probably flare up and then die down this way.

      The only ones that last very long are cunning ones, like malaria and AIDS, that fool peoples’ immune systems.

    • Photo: Clare Taylor

      Clare Taylor answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      Hi @henryjones!

      In terms of short-lived infectious diseases, there are diseases that we call ’emerging infectious diseases’ that are usually short-lived, Often this is because the infection jumps across a species barrier, like from an animal to a human. The disease is usually short-lived because the causative bacterium or virus can’t adapt to it’s new host (the human) and is killed by the immune system so it isn’t spread to anyone else. Other emerging diseases (like ebola) are so harmful that they kill their hosts before they can be spread to too many people so the disease dies out because there is no-one left to spread to. Bit of a silly strategy really to kill your host.

      In terms of diseases that humans have made disappear, did you know that so far only one human disease has ever been eradicated (got rid of for ever)? After a massive global effort, the infectious disease smallpox has been banished after an intense campaign of vaccination and we haven’t seen a case since 1977. At the moment, we are trying to eradicate the polio virus and so far in 2012, we have seen only 60 reported cases in the whole world so it looks like we may be winning!

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