• Question: if you found a new disease that no one knew about how would you go about dealing with that and what would you do to find out more?

    Asked by kayacato on 19 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by devanparmar, chickeny, mackenziefookes.
    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      The first thing to do would be to make sure that the person/ people that were showing signs of it were kept away from everyone else to prevent it from spreading!
      I suppose the next thing would be to take as many samples as possible in order to test them- it could be that the disease is caused by something closely related to something we already know about. At the same time, we would have to do all we could to make the patients comfortable.
      The type of tests we’d do would depend on roughly what we thought we were dealing with- is it a virus, a bacteria or something else? if it was a virus/ bacteria, the first thing to do would be to test the drugs that we currently have for known diseases to see if they were effective. If so, great. If not, it might be a case of looking deeper and finding out more about how it actually works, so that we could find another solution.
      Either way, it would be a race against time with hopefully a good outcome for the patient(s)…

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      I would start by looking at where the disease is, who has it, what is causing it, what is it affecting in the body, what is the best way to treat it.

      In more detail: we would firstly do everything to make the patient comfortable and stop the disease spreading. Then look at the symptoms that the people are showing and see if there is anything what would help them – this would probably to be done by doctors and nurses.
      Then in the lab as scientist, we would study what it is actually doing to cells of the body and see if there are drugs that we can use to treat it.

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      As Paul said, when we find a new disease the first step is to stop it spreading! It’s best to be as careful as possible and keep that person or animal isolated until you have more information. Then you want to find out as much as you can about the disease so you can figure out what it might do. To do this, you’d compare it with any similar disease we already know about and look for similarities and differences. The most important thing would be to find a way to cure or stop the disease, so we’d try lots of different treatments in animals to see which might work.

    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Funny! I actually set a version of this as an exam question this year!

      First is simple, what’s the disease like? Is it similar to one we already know about? How is it spread? Where did it come from? What are the symptoms? The recently identified New Coronovirus was very quickly identified from these very simple questions (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21503893 ).
      Once we’ve got some idea of what it might be these days we use sequencing to get a firmer idea of exactly what it is. If it’s a brand new disease we then try and work out if any of our existing therapies might work with it. We also race to develop diagnostic tests to screen for it in the places it came from and to see how widespread the problem is. Every couple of years a new virus pops up, most of the time they’re restricted and short term problems, but sometimes they can be really serious (HIV).

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I thought and thought about this question! I wasn’t sure how I’d go about doing it, because really it depends on what sort of disease it is. Because in the first place, how do you KNOW you’ve found a new disease?

      Situation #1: A patient comes into the hospital with some symptoms – say a fever, or a stomachache, or a rash. Doctors quite often give a diagnosis based on those symptoms, so the patient will get given the medication for whatever disease the doctors think they have – usually we wouldn’t think right away that it’s a new disease! Except – now the medicine isn’t working! Hmm. We’ll do a few tests, and figure out that it ISN’T the disease we thought it was. Then we’ll maybe try some different medicine, while we do more tests. By the time we figure out what it is, we’ll have tried most of the likely options for meds (actually the stuff we tried will probably help us figure out what it’s NOT). And if none of the drugs we already have are working, then we’ll have to start from scratch – take the disease into the lab and do experiments on it!

      Situation #2: We know that some symptoms regularly show up in new diseases – the flu, for example – a fever, a cough, a runny nose. That’s because the flu virus mutates so quickly, that every season brings a new strain of the disease. Sometimes the symptoms are a lot more serious than usual, and then we quickly check to see what kind of virus it is – and sometimes we find something big, like the bird flu or swine flu. But because we know what sort of ‘format’ the viruses follow, we can quickly tell which of our drugs will work and which ones won’t, or what sort of new drug we’ll have to make. In that case it will be fairly straightforward to find out more about the new disease, because we know roughly which bits of the virus mutate and what they do, so we can make pretty good guesses about what we should do about it.

      Situation #3: A patient comes in with something that’s obviously never been seen before! It’d have to be something pretty drastic, like if the person had turned completely green, or had started growing wings – because the world of medicine has probably seen a LOT of weird things before! And it’d have to be something that doesn’t kill the patient immediately (as in, you can’t just find them dead – because then we’d just take it straight into the lab). In this rare case, most of what Paul, Ruth, Katy and Peter said will apply – you’d first quarantine the person to make sure whatever he has doesn’t spread, and then you’d probably take some of his cells and look at them under a microscope, to see what on earth is going on! There are lots of other tests we can do on cells, to see if their proteins and DNA are normal, and we can do tests on the person too, like take x-rays or CT scans. Every test will give us a clue to what the disease is, and take us closer to finding a cure. As the others have said, you’d also try to treat the symptoms as well as you could in the meantime – if the patient was feeling pain, you’d give him painkillers, and so on.

      I hope this isn’t too long an answer – I just think a lot depends on how the disease appeared in the first place!

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