• Question: have you stoped any disease if so what ones

    Asked by anon-186248 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 6 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-186803.
    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      The bacteria I have worked on in the past have been ones called E. coli, C. difficile and Pseudomonas. It will be the medical doctors in hospitals treating these. Scientists collectively work together to understand these diseases and stop them by developing vaccines, diagnostics, antibiotics and treatments. The medical staff will then administer these new developments to patients. The work other scientists and I have done in the past have contributed to this in some capacity.

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      My research has helped us understand how people’s behaviour affects the success of vaccination campaigns against sexually transmitted infections like HPV. Research like
      mine helps other researchers know what they have to include in their vaccination models. These models gives policy makers the knowledge and confidence of how well a vaccination campaign is going to go. Data on people’s behaviour is collected by social scientists, and vaccines are produced by biologists. Science is one massive collaborative effort, but in some small way my research helps stop the spread of STIs like HPV.

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      I work on Ebola, and one day I would hope that one day I can produce some results that will help people that work in public health during outbreaks to make better decisions. I am trying to work out which disease control responses (like isolating people so they can’t infect others) to Ebola help the most, so that money and people can be directed to the right places.
      Last year I worked on better way to report outbreaks of Typhoid Fever ( a nasty bacterial disease spread through food and water) in Uganda. Hopefully the next time there’s an outbreak of that, they can use the reporting system I was testing!
      But science is all about working with people – it is very rare that a single person will stop a disease. One example might be Donald Henderson who really led the effort to eradicate smallpox, but even then there were thousands of people involved!

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