• Question: do you think there will ever be a cure for horrible diseases like cancer HIV malaria and how do you prevent these diseases ?

    Asked by taku11 to Mike, Suze, Will on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suze Kundu

      Suze Kundu answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I think that with things like cancer, technology to detect the cancer as well as technology to remove cancers that have already developed will move on very quickly, to make treatments less invasive, and makeit easier to test for cancers.

      I hope that the rates of HIV will go down. It is a virus, and so can be caught from other people. One common method of spreading the virus is by having unprotected sex. There are some really sad stories from some countries where some people that were carrying the virus forced themselves onto other people, and they have caught the virus, and it has passed onto their kids. There are generations of children that have lost their parents to HIV, and are themselves suffering with the virus, so it’s a really terrible illness. There are ways to prevent the spread of infection, and a lot of these ways require better education about the virus, and also the availability of contraceptive protection if unsafe sex is the reason that it is spreading. I know that some religions don’t believe in contraception, but when it comes to something like getting a potentially deadly virus or not, I think that it is more important to practice safe sex. It’s something that can be eradicated, if the spread is stopped.

      Malaria is a funny one. It’s a little bit like a cold, in the way that you can’t quite pinpoint a cure for it, because it is always changing. These changes are called mutations. If you found a cure for one type of malaria, the parasites that are injected into your blood by the mosquitos that carry it become resistant to the cure. I did meet a guy in a pub a while back that was working on mossies and malaria, so if I can get any info from him, I’ll pass it onto you!

      That got pretty heavy on the HIV question there, but it’s a really important issue, and I hope that it’s something that will soon be eradicated. Let me know if you have any questions!

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