• Question: WHY DO YOU THINK THERE ARE SO MANY ILLNESS?

    Asked by 557rhed48 to David, Eva, Kate, Nicholas, Rachel on 17 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: David Nunan

      David Nunan answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Hey,

      That’s a tricky one. I think we are probably living better with more illnesses because our medicine and healthcare has got better. In the past, a lot of the illnesses we can now live with would have killed us much sooner than they do now. These include diabetes and obesity.

      In the 1900 we used to live on average to only 30 years of age and now the average age is about 70. So we see a lot more illness around because more people are living to an older age and old age is also associated with more illness.

      In the 1950’s we also switched from infectious diseases (flu, small pox) being our biggest killer to chronic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease causing us more ill health. This was due to our increasing sedentary lifestyle as improvements in technology (such as transport and food production) meant that we didn’t need to move as much to work and more low cost food became readily available. This has remained until today and chronic disease is now our biggest health problem.

    • Photo: Eva Weiss

      Eva Weiss answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      There are many different kinds of illneses. Some are genetic: there are changes in the genetic material, which lead to some function being changed. Depending on where the change is and how bad it is, the resulting disease would be more or less bad (example Parkinson’s, Down syndrome…). These changes happen all the time at random and most happen in places where they don’t have any effect but sometimes they do. That’s why there are many different genetic diseases but each is fairly rare in itself. Then there are diseases caused by parasites. Parasites need a host to survive and they tend to evolve together with the host. The milder the disease, the longer the parasite has been co-evolving with the host. Same holds true for viral and bacterial diseases. There are many different kinds of viruses and bacteria and only few afftect humans. They also need to be in or on a human to multiply and live. Cancer is not unlike a genetic disease just that different parts of the genes are affected and it happens later in life.
      Basically, you could say that there are so many illnesses that affect us because we are so complex. Like mobile phones used to be so simple, an old Nokia lasted 10 years, you could throw it against the wall and the wall broke. Whereas new smartphones have problems all the time because there is so much complex technology that can break or misfunction. We are like the smartphone: complex, which makes us special but also more vulnerable to something going wrong.

    • Photo: Nicholas Pearce

      Nicholas Pearce answered on 20 Nov 2015:

      Hey,

      There are a lot of germs out there because it’s easy for them to evolve. Viruses and bacteria are very simple organisms and have mechanisms to swap DNA with each other quickly. This means they can evolve into new strains quickly, so there are many different types of germs.

      Although not all bacteria and viruses can cause illness because there are so many, they have developed lots of different ways of surviving in a human body – and can cause bad side effects like illnesses.

      Thanks to having great medicines nowadays, we survive lots of illnesses too, so we live long enough to get sick so many times. (It’s a good thing though.)

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