• Question: Has there ever been an outbreak of a disease that you were studying, that particularly either motivated or scared you?

    Asked by anon-186001 to Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine on 12 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      I would say the one that motivated and scared me was Ebola virus. This happened when I was studying at University before I became a research scientist. As it was a current topic in virology (the study of viruses), lots of our professors taught lectures on it and showed the research they were doing at the time. This really highlighted how important some of the work scientists do was. How deadly the virus was scared me as we didn’t really have any way of stopping it when the outbreak hit.

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      One sexually transmitted infection that concerns me quite a lot is gonnorhea. The number of yearly cases of gonorrhea has been steadily increasing, but it is usually treated easily with antibiotics. However, there has begun to be cases of antibiotic resistant gonnorhea, which can’t be cured by any of our usual antibiotics. It is a very real possibility that gonnorhea resistant to all antibiotics will evolve soon, which will make its spread much harder to control.

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