• Question: Why havent scientists cured cancer and AIDs and other diseses?

    Asked by hannahbegley to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi hannah,

      We have lots of cures for cancer, such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgical processes (cutting out the cancer tumours). Both my parents have had cancer and survived. But lots of cancers are different to each other, and we haven’t worked out ways to treat them all yet. The other important thing with cancer is to catch it early. If you do, it can usually be treated. If you wait too long, the cancer can spread all around the body, and then there may be nothing doctors can do.

      AIDS is caused by a virus, which gets into your white blood cells and destroys them. This destroys you’re immune system, which means you can’t fight off normal infections, which then kill you. We don’t know how to treat any viruses yet – whether it’s AIDS or the common cold. Viruses are strange things, they’re not really even alive. They are basically bits of DNA that get into your cells and hijack the DNA in your cells that tells them what to do, and instead makes the cell make lots more viruses DNA instead. Because they are not really alive in the first place, it’s impossible to kill them.

      However, we have invented retro-viral drugs that can help significantly slow down the infection, giving AIDS sufferers a much longer and productive life.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi hannahbegley

      All I’d add to James V’s answer is that there are a number of illnesses and diseases out there that medical science is yet to cure, but I’m sure they will do. We have vaccines for so many things and when the world wants to, we can immunise and protect everyone from a disease on the whole planet. We did this with Polio, a disease which was crippling people and killing people in the UK, all over Europe and America, everywhere in the world in the 1960’s, in the 1970’s we found a way to immunise ourselves and we did it globally and defeated a disease.

      Everyday medical science makes advances like this, so I believe that the survival rates for cancer will increase and who knows we may even crack how to treat viruses!

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