• Question: when did you learn to slow down the disease?

    Asked by anon-243317 to Pan-ngum, Natalia, Mick, Manjit, Filipe, Bruce on 7 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Natalia Brodaczewska

      Natalia Brodaczewska answered on 7 Mar 2020: last edited 7 Mar 2020 9:29 am

      I think it happened gradually over time. For cancer, the first ever chemotherapy was discovered in 1940s and it was actually mustard gas which was used during the war. Over years we have moved to drugs which are a bit safer though still can cause a lot of damage to our body. I think the big breakthrough was when we started to use drugs which can specifically recognise cancer cells in our body, rather than attacking everything. I don’t know what was the first drug of this kind but the most famous example that I know of is Imatinib. This drug was first introduced about 20 years ago and is used to treat a type of leukeamia (a cancer of white blood cells) known as chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). It is a pretty awesome drug – in the past people with CML used to die at young age and now they can live for many years without problems!

    • Photo: Michael Schubert

      Michael Schubert answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Scientists and doctors are always working on learning how to slow down disease. They have been doing this ever since the very first doctors and medical scientists back in ancient times – but we are still getting better and better at it.
      Like Natalia said, one of the big things we’ve discovered recently are drugs that can “tell the difference” between healthy cells and cancer cells, so that they only attack the bad cells. Another thing we have nowadays is better ways of finding out whether someone has a disease. The earlier we can find out that a person has an illness like cancer, the easier it is to treat – and this is why lots of people now survive illnesses that used to be very deadly. And the earlier we can spot infectious diseases (ones that are caused by viruses or bacteria and travel from person to person), the faster we can treat them and also quarantine those people (keep them separate from healthy people) so that we can stop these diseases from spreading.

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