• Question: If you got to chose ONE disease/virus to take away, which one would it be??

    Asked by anon-311667 on 10 Feb 2022.
    • Photo: Valerie Vancollie

      Valerie Vancollie answered on 10 Feb 2022:

      Hmm, this is a very difficult question as there are so many disease and viruses in the world and many of them affect a huge number of people.

      Malaria, for instance, still kills over half a million people a year.

      Ebola, meanwhile, can kill well over 90% of people it infects, so while the outbreaks aren’t as big (relatively speaking), over the years it can rack of a huge death toll and always has the possibility of become a massive problem if it were to mutate to become airborne.

      Something like the flu, as well can’t be discounted from the list because the death toll from it is really big as well if you count everyone it has ever killed. Including the 1918 pandemic.

    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 10 Feb 2022:

      Great question, and very tricky to answer.

      I agree with Valerie that malaria is a good pick, as it is very hard to get rid of and has been a huge problem in certain parts of the world throughout history.

      Of course you could look at non-infectious diseases like cancer or dementia, but they are really a whole category of different diseases with various causes, so a bit of a cheat answer

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 13 Feb 2022:

      Hi 🙂
      That’s a really good question!
      I think malaria is a good one, but it’s also not very deadly (as in it only kills a small percentage of people who get it) and doesn’t spread from human to human.
      I think I would probably choose SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 because it has the biggest impact on our lives right now, but it would be wonderfull to defeat malaria, the pest or yellow fever.
      For non-infectious diseases cancer would be the first on my mind, but there are so many different ones with different causes that they also count as different diseases so I would probably say breast cancer because it is so common.

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