Disease...

I think that people will get the wrong idea about this post but I'll gladly debate about this issue.

I find that it's kind of silly to hope for the eradication of diseases from the face of the Earth. That's the last thing I would ever want on this planet is a world without disease. But why?

I can understand the movement to find the cure for malaria and AIDS because it effects so many people, but rather than finding chemotherapeutic cures to these diseases, we should re-evaluate the long-term consequences of finding miracle cures.

Why? Why can't we just pop some pills for every ill? Why can't we just take all the antibiotics or antivirals we ever need to keep us alive and immune from a world dominated by microbes? Well, it's too short-sighted to think that for every problem, there's a viable medical solution that works one hundred percent of the time.

People are too short-sighted to realize that to find the cure to AIDS is a BAD thing. Think about the population of Africa as it is. It is struggling to feed its own people, and that's with hundreds of millions of people with AIDS and malaria. Imagine if those people who are infected don't die because we found a cure. Africa would suffer from a humanitarian crisis due to a sudden population boom.

It's called the epidemiologist's dilemma. We have to balance the positive consequences with the negative consequences of curing diseases. The negative consequences focus on how curing diseases will have a tragic impact on their ability to adjust to an increase in their population from people who are no longer dying from the disease.

The positive is that we're saving people's lives and helping the human race (like it really needs help since we always seem to shoot ourselves in the foot in one way or the other). I feel like this in essence is promoting more sociological problems than it solves. And people think it's the duty of science to find the answers to whatever shit that humanity gets itself into. In the harsh reality of nature that we live in, humanity will always get itself into more shit than it can ever clean up.

I feel like we need to re-evaluate our perception of how we deal with these issues. I understand that it turns into a personal fight since people know people with AIDS or some other disease and they want to see them get better. It's not that I want to see them die, it's just that in the big picture, we don't serve humanity's best interest by finding wonder cures for these diseases.

So then what's the answer to these questions about disease? We need diseases to keep our populations from growing out of control.

I can see now why people don't like science. They hate learning about the brutal truth. People hate to realize that sometimes the best thing for all mankind is to do nothing. It's in our nature to want to help our fellow man, but in doing so we are also screwing over everybody else in the long run.

We are not being selected by nature anymore. We're already playing God (or trying to). We're defying the laws of survival in nature and nature lashes out by creating resistant strains of bacteria and viruses and resistant forms of parasitic infections. And we wonder why we can't keep up. Nature doesn't give a damn about our quality of life. And why should it? We've done everything to destroy the environment for our own benefit and we expect nature to sit back and take it?

I get kind of mixed feelings about these movements about finding the cure to things. The whole multi-colored ribbons and such. If only people looked beyond their wallets and their faith to truly evaluate the state of humanity as a whole when making decisions like these.

If you're personally offended or disgusted, that's not my intention. It's just that people think they're always making the morally right choice when they've never seen the other side or don't have the whole picture. If you have friends or family who are affected by AIDS by all means support their endeavors. Keep in mind that I'm looking at the perspective of the survival of humanity as a species and not of your personal friend or family member who you will always side for regardless of the long-term consequences of their illness.

It's the naivety that makes us a vulnerable species to our own endangerment and extinction. We will be the greatest contributor to our own extinction if it ever comes to that simply because we've lost sight of where we live and what the consequences are of tinkering with nature.