• Question: how long have diseases been around???

    Asked by acmh28 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      For ever and ever. There is absolutely no reason to think dinosaurs didn’t catch colds. Katy can tell you how we can find related “ghosts” of long gone virus sequences in humans and fish, suggesting that those diseases were around before these evolutionary lines split apart,- a very very long way back.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Diseases have been around pretty much as long as living creatures have been around, so they have had millions (probably billions) of years to become very good at what they do. I’m sure that if the dinosaurs hadnt been wiped out by a giant asteroid then a disease or two would have come along and done a similar job!

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Definitely as long as life has been around!! And there is debate about how long that has been – it could be billions of years or just thousands or millions…..

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      ‘Disease’ means something going wrong with the body. So diseases have been around as long as there’s something that CAN go wrong – so as long as ‘bodies’ have existed!

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Yep, a long time! Some of the viruses I study are nearly 150 million years old and infected the very first mammals. And these are nowhere near the oldest viruses – some insect viruses have been found which may be 300 million years old (read about them here: http://www.livescience.com/16015-oldest-viruses-insects.html) – before dinosaurs were around and 293 million years before humans split from chimpanzees!

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