Is the End of Disease in Sight?

“I KNOW of no medical problems we will not be able to solve in the near future.”

The speaker was one of the world’s leading scientists, a researcher at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, U.S.A. He had just completed the world’s first bone-marrow transplant. The operation had opened the way to investigations of often fatal blood diseases such as leukemia, hemophilia, sickle-cell anemia and Hodgkin’s disease.

Was it too soon to envision a land in which no resident would say, “I am sick”? (Isaiah 33:24) The scientist Dr. Robert Good believed a revolution in medicine was just beginning. That was in 1975. Dr. Good was not alone in predicting the end of disease.

Two years earlier, epidemic experts at the CDC (United States National Centers for Disease Control) were delighted. Medical scientists had headed off an expected epidemic of rubella. The threat, said Dr. John Witte of the CDC, was averted by immunizing children between five and nine years of age with a highly effective new vaccine. A level of immunity between 75 and 80 percent was obtained.

In the United States massive outbreaks of rubella had been recurring regularly every six to nine years. Based on the last rubella epidemic in 1964, hundreds of thousands of people had been spared the scourge. In 1964-65 it caused as many as 50,000 tragedies in one form or another​—birth defects, stillbirths or therapeutic abortions. But in 1970 only 77 cases of children deformed by prenatal exposure to rubella were reported. In 1971 there were only 68 cases and in 1972, 33 cases.

“The Epidemic That Never Happened,” said a newspaper headline, greeting the triumph. Then, suddenly, fear of another epidemic gripped the country. It was the 1976 threat of “swine flu.” Newspapers were comparing the new flu virus with the Spanish influenza, which killed 21.6 million people in 1918-19. Quickly, the president and Congress of the United States approved $135 million to produce free serum for everyone. There was no epidemic.

That same year, smallpox​—the disfiguring, blinding, killing scourge of mankind—​was close to being wiped from the earth. WHO (World Health Organization) reported that by September only seven persons in remote desert villages in Ethiopia were known to have smallpox. According to WHO, just nine years earlier smallpox had stricken 10 to 15 million persons and 2 million had died in 43 lands. By 1980 the organization was able to announce confidently: “Smallpox is dead!”

Can Other Great Killers Be Conquered Too?

In 1977 the United States targeted seven communicable childhood diseases for eradication. The attack was launched by a nationwide Childhood Immunization Initiative. During the next five years, the CDC reported that at least 90 percent of the nation’s children were immunized. On May 7, 1982, the CDC announced considerable success: The incidence of measles had dropped 77 percent, mumps 45 percent, polio 25 percent, rubella 47 percent, tetanus 37 percent; diphtheria and whooping cough had also dropped to near-record lows.

In many fields medical science was lifting the hopes of suffering mankind. New antibiotics, vaccines and mental-disorder drugs; new procedures​—prosthetic surgery (parts replacement), microsurgery, organ transplants—​the advance of medical science was promising to prolong life and enhance the quality of life to an extent undreamed of a few years before.

“Twenty years ago,” recounted Dr. T. Albert Farmer, Jr., of the University of Maryland, in 1981, “the five-year survival rate for children under 15 years of age with leukemia was less than 1 percent; today, more than half can be cured. Fifteen years ago choriocarcinoma of the ovary had a 100 percent mortality rate; today the cure rate is almost 100 percent.”

He added: “By the mid-1960s we had practically eliminated polio; we introduced psychoactive drugs that enabled us to keep huge numbers of people out of institutions.”

In so many ways, the Sloan-Kettering scientist’s prediction appeared to be holding true. But what about the other big killers? Was there not reason to share Dr. Good’s glowing assurance that “the same scientific revolution . . . will wipe out diseases such as stroke, heart disease, cancer, and those diseases caused by bacteria, viruses and birth defects”?

Man’s triumph over disease​—is it at last in sight?

[Blurb on page 4]

“I know of no medical problems we will not be able to solve in the near future.”