-
Asked by to Amy, Anita, Daryl on 25 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
-
Amy Monaghan answered on 25 Jun 2014:
Hi Maddyplows
The biggest problem with eradicating diseases like smallpox that we are experiencing at the moment is people not taking up vaccinations that they are offered! If everyone was vaccinated against a disease, it loses it’s ability to spread and eventually is eradicated. We have come very close to eradicating polio, but because people do not always present with recognisable symptoms it keeps spreading in a very small number of people.
The other problem with eradicating diseases is that most diseases are spread in a number of ways. Smallpox was only spread by people (although cowpox a similar disease provided protection too). Most infectious diseases can be spread by a number of animals or contaminated water sources which make them more difficult to control. This is what makes eradicating diseases such as malaria difficult, as they spread in the same way that mosquitos do.
-
-
Daryl Jones answered on 25 Jun 2014:
Good question! Very good 🙂
One of the simplest answers is this:
Scientists and doctors decided to vaccinate EVERYONE. But it soon became clear that it was impossible to vaccinate everyone in the world, so what they did instead was find out which people were infected, and then vaccinate all the people that might come into contact with that person- for example, vaccinate the whole village! And perhaps a few surrounding villages too. That way, the blocked the spread of smapllpox without having to vaccinate everyone in the world!
With other diseases it is much more difficult- we know we can’t vaccinate everyone, and the approach we used to target smallpox doesn’t work with other diseases because they spread differently. For example, malaria spreads by mosquito bites. We can’t kill ALL mosquitos. So, we would have to find every mosquito that was had malaria, and try to kill every one. That is seemingly impossible!
I hope that makes sense!
Great question. -
Anita Thomas answered on 25 Jun 2014:
The smallpox campaign was phenomenal – pretty much unprecedented. The most similar campaign at the moment would be the anti-malarial campaign, I think. It’s amazingly expensive to even to think about. For a start, everybody needs to be vaccinated/treated…………….and there are a lot more people living now than during the smallpox campaign. We were so lucky with Jenner discovering that cowpox was benign but so similar to smallpox! We may never be so lucky again!
In any case, I doubt if we will ever be able to eradicate diseases that also occur in other species, eg TB.
Good question, thank you!
Comments