Mr. P said:
Right you are, consider some random thoughts
..
We have invented vaccine for polio, but not the common cold.
We have landed on the moon, but havent cured the common cold.
We discovered and treated Legionaries disease in months, but havent cured the common cold.
Etc,etc
.
I DONT subscribe to the drug company conspiracy stuff, but Ya gotta wonder.
*Dons science cap*
As a geek, I feel that it's my duty to inform those who don't know exactly
why we haven't cured the common cold.
First off, there is no singular disease known as "the common cold." In fact, the sheer number of cold viruses is so vast that they haven't even been named, merely numbered. Notice that symptoms vary. Sometimes, you get a cold and you have a runny nose and sneeze a lot. Sometimes, it's a cough. That's because there are hundreds of different "cold" viruses. Theoretically, we could vaccinate against the common cold, like we did against smallpox, but it would cost trillions of dollars in research and would take hundreds of shots, not to mention the fact that, in order to keep from overwhelming your immune system, they'd only be able to be given a few at a time. Other, virtually eliminated viruses, on the other hand, have only one strain. Polio, measles, mumps, scarlet feaver, smallpox...all of them are only a single virus, meaning it only takes a vaccination to immunize (or actually catching a case and getting over it, but who wants that?)
As for the other examples listed:
Travelling to the moon was mainly a question of achieving escape velocity with enough air to get to the moon and then precise enough instruments to hit the atmosphere at the right angle. The computer they used was larger than my room and less powerful than a 486.
Legionnaires disease is a bacteria, making it easily treatable with common antibiotics such as penicillin and erithromycin.
AIDS, on the other hand, is a tough case. First off, it targets the immune system, the very devices meant to fight it. Second, it mutates faster than the flu virus, meaning that there are now dozens of strains, each of which must be treated seperately. Lastly, AIDS is the most preventable plague in the world right now, and the majority of funding has gone into the much easier aspect of AIDS, prevention.
The easy answer to the question, "Why have they cured this, but not that?" is "Some diseases are easier to cure than others."
