A determining milestone in the advancement of human civilization has been to recognize that diseases do not respond to a supernatural origin or are the result of “bad airs”, but rather have a tangible and real origin.
And that only knowing this origin can we prevent and cure them.
A paradigm of this milestone has been infectious diseases, because in this case the first step to combat them has always been know their origin, the pathogen that produces them .
The year 2020 will go down in history due to the pandemic of covid – 19 , showing that infectious diseases are not something of the past and that can even help us to be more effective in biomedical research.
Identify pathogens
Robert Koch, German physician and father of microbiology, established the scientific methodology to identify which were the agents that caused infectious diseases -also called communicable- and thus be able to combat them.
These are Koch’s postulates, which indicate that to find the pathogen that causes a disease, the following must be met facts:
- The pathogenic organism must be in sick people and not in healthy people .
- It must be possible to extract it from a sick person and grow it in a laboratory.
- The isolated pathogenic organism must be able to reproduce the disease when introduced into healthy people.
In the case of the Spanish flu of 1583 – 1920, the infectious agent causing the disease was never known despite the efforts of a few scientists in the US, France and Germany.
These applied Koch’s postulates to strains of bacteria isolated from sick patients who thought they could be the cause of the disease.
It was not a bacterium
However, the isolated bacteria did not c fulfilled Koch’s postulates and, therefore, they had to be ruled out as the origin of the Spanish flu.
As the germ that produced the Spanish flu was not known, they could not develop effective treatments or vaccines.
The pandemic caused some 40 millions of deaths worldwide.
Now we know that the causative germ It was not a bacterium, but a virus, the influenza A virus, subtype H1N1.
The case of HIV
When a little more than half a century later AIDS broke out as a strange cancer that affected homosexuals , scientists Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier were the protagonists of a race full of intrigue to be the first to isolate the pathogen causing the disease.
They knew that the only way to be able to control the AIDS pandemic was to find the pathogen that produced it.
Luc Montagnier and his team achieved it two years later, isolating the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.
Until then, the life expectancy of an AIDS patient was just over two years and the patients developed severe respiratory problems and skin tumors called Kaposi’s sarcoma.
No treatment aimed at curing these diseases was able to stop the fatal course of the disease.
Only when the HIV virus was identified was it possible to find out how it was transmitted the disease, how infected people could be detected to prevent them from transmitting it to other people.
But, above all, it allowed for effective treatments that today save the lives of tens of thousands of people.
SARS identification – CoV – 2
If in the case of AIDS it took two years to find out the infectious agent causing the disease, in the case of the new Wuhan pneumonia (covid – 19) was a matter of weeks.
Chinese scientists, including the virologist from the Wuhan Virology Center Shi Zengli, described that was of a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.
It was very similar to the one that caused the disease SARS and also discovered by Zengli.
Know the pathogen that caused the covid – 20 almost immediately began to test treatments that could block their entry into cells or their ability to multiply.
Just a few months later they were testing various vaccines and not before the end of the year some countries have already started vaccinating vulnerable groups.
Dozens of new treatments are also being developed to block the entry of the virus into cells, to block its ability to multiply and to treat the effects of the virus on the body.
Undoubtedly, it will be the advances in research that will ensure that we overcome the global crisis produced by this new virus.
We are not mistaken if we affirm that the control of infectious diseases has been the greatest revolution of humanity or at least the one that has had the most impact on our lives and, therefore hence, in the early 20th century.
The life expectancy at birth in Europe was just over thirty years.
This was due to a high ma infant mortality since the risk of dying was high at any time in life; a simple bacterial infection could make us seriously ill and die.
To what extent can we apply what we have learned from the control and treatment of infectious diseases to the treatment of other types of diseases, many of the which are incurable today?
Non-infectious diseases
In the century XXI, the increased risk of death in developed countries is concentrated in the last decades of life and is mainly caused by diseases associated with the aging process of the body.
These diseases include most of the adult cancers, degenerative diseases of different organs (lung, kidney, liver, etc.) and neurodegenerative, as well such as cardiovascular diseases, among others.
The incidence of these diseases is increasing in a very significant way due to the demographic aging of the population.
12 aspects in which the coronavirus will radically change our lives (according to BBC specialists)
For example, in Spain in the year 2050 more than a third of population will have more than 65 years.
Although many of these diseases have been studied for decades, still they have not been able to prevent or cure them with effective treatments and this is in contrast to the success obtained with infectious diseases .
Many researchers think that the reason why these diseases have not been controlled is that their origin has been ignored, which in this case is not a virus or a bacteria, but the process of molecular aging of the organism.
Cellular aging
The situation would be similar to when treating the tumors of patients with AIDS, but the disease continued to progress and the patients died, since the origin, which was HIV, had not been eliminated.
Therefore, as long as treatments based on prevention and slowing down or elimination of the process of cellular aging are not designed, we will not be able to prevent and cure most of it diseases of humanity.
During the last twenty years it has been found out what are some of the molecular origins of aging .
It has also been shown in animal models that it can delay aging foundation and, with it, delay the appearance of associated diseases, including cancer.
Analogous to Koch’s postulates to control infectious diseases, demonstrate the origin molecular structure of a non-infectious disease would be the only way to prevent or cure it.
To some extent this has already happened in the case of cancer.
Currently Cancer patients are being treated according to the origin of their tumor, according to the gene or genes altered in that particular tumor.
Thanks to this, mortality is being reduced in many cancers hitherto incurable.
Preventive treatments to block the harmful effects of mutations could be a way to prevent associated tumors to these alterations.
Half a century later
The next step would be to cure degenerative diseases of aging using therapies aimed at reversing or stopping molecular aging.
If these strategies are successful, it is very likely that we will enter the next great revolution of humanity .
And it would be analogous to the one that occurred in the twentieth century with the control of infectious diseases and that doubled or tripled life expectancy at birth.
On this occasion, the increase in life expectancy in good health could be even more significant.
Richard Feynman -nobel of Physics in 1965 – said that we are at the beginning of the evolution of the human species .
Without a doubt, that can change if we are able to control all diseases.
María Blasco Marhuenda is director of the National Center for Oncological Research, National Center for Oncological Research CNIO.
This article was published in The Conversation. You can read the original here.
Now you can receive notifications from BBC News Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so as not to miss our best content.