Eradicate Disease

I watched last week a nice BBC documentary about Viruses. It touches many different topics:

• Archaea are in a good proportion extremophiles and are full of viruses.


• The last thing a virus really wants to do is to kill us. We're their hosts, they need us to live... so a successful virus is one that replicates and infects with ease, but does not cause too much harm to the host.


• I'd never heard about the concept of Viral sex. This is a fun name for a rather tragic circunstance: when 2 viruses meet in one host and exchange their genetic material (this is what happened with the infamous N1H1 virus)


• and many more things...

But what mainly called my attention was something that I already knew but hadn't paid too much attention to... eradicate disease
Well, it sounds so appealing, it should be the ultimate goal of medicine, but what have we really achived in that sense?
Over the centuries we've done tremendous advances: hygiene, all sort of treatments: antibiotics, vaccines, cirugy, transplants...
These techniques work in different ways: try to minimize our chance of falling ill, try to minimize the effects the illness has on us, try to restore our lost health...
but none of them has achieved the final goal, eradicating the disease from the face of the Earth for once and forever... except for smallpox.

Smallpox was a terrible viral disease affecting only humans, highly contagious and with a high death rate. It was a horrible inhabitant of Planet Earth until that in 1979, after many succesful vaccination campaings it was eradicated. It's not that it no longer can penetrate our cells or defeat our immune system, it's that it no longer exists!
It's been maybe the biggest achievement in the history of medicine.
Well, a few members of that damned lineage still exist, but securely trapped (well, that's what I'd like to believe) in some highly protected bio laboratory in Atlanta's CDC and in Russian Vector Institute

Another interesting thing the documentary deals with is AIDS. From this and other documentaries you learn how difficult is to find a full cure for it due to its enormous mutation rate, and at the same time how in the last years (and in wealthy countries) it has passed from being a death sentence to being a chronic disease that can be kept at bay thanks to a cocktail of antiviral drugs.
This is also a big achivement for a generation like mine, that grew up with the discovery of the disease, a disease that at a time was called to be one of the biggest threats to humanity (yes, the headlines in the news in the mid 80's were terrifying, and more for 10 years old kids...)
Let's hope the current genetic revolution will manage to bring to their knees many other of our so feared enemies...