• Question: If evryone was isolated from each other would many diseases die out?

    Asked by jonathanjoyce96 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB on 26 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 26 Jun 2013:


      Infectious diseases require new hosts all the time, if they don’t get them, they die. But how could you isolate 7 billion people from one another?
      Quarantine of infected people away from everyone else is a proven effective method to stop disease spread and has been used since Roman times. Indeed quarantine is from the latin word “quadraginta” meaning 40 days, which is the time required by roman law for an infected person to be kept in isolation.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 26 Jun 2013:


      Hi joonathanjoyce96- in theory they would, but this might prove tricky!
      People with highly infectious dangerous diseases are kept in isolation in order to keep the disease under control, and this seems to be the key to preventing epidemics (when lots of people get sick)
      diseases are so hard to control- the only one we’ve actually made extinct is smallpox (so far)

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 27 Jun 2013:


      If we kept everyone separate from each other, in one generation we humans would die out too 😉 Can’t have children on your own…

      But, even theoretically, quarantine only works on infectious diseases. Those would probably disappear because every instance of the pathogen (bacterium, virus or parasite) capable of infecting a human would go away, either cleared away by the host’s immune system or killed when the host dies. But many of these pathogens can undergo zoonosis (they evolve so that they can live in an animal host for a while, and then evolve again to infect humans) so once we came out of quarantine we’d catch a whole new batch of diseases.

      All the other diseases that didn’t involve infection – there is a massive list from heart disease to lupus to cancer – wouldn’t be affected at all. Genetic diseases might decrease a bit if people who had them were allowed to die alone, but you’d still have many carriers (people who carry a copy of the gene but often don’t show any of the disease symptoms), so once the carriers had children the disease would pop up again. And things like cancer happen from within your own body – even if you were the last man on earth you’d still get cancer!

      All in all, I don’t think it’s worth the effort of getting all 7 billion of us to live in little individual plastic bubbles for the rest of our lives 🙂

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