How did diseases come about through evolution; And how are they evolving currently?
This lead to the antibiotic era, this was an era when antibiotics begin to develop. In this era at a point in time, antibiotics begin to be misused and overused. At that time they didn’t know that antibiotics were only effective against bacterial infections. So this did more harm than good, because by people overusing antibiotics, microbes became smarter making immune to them. Not only did microbes become resistant they started creating strains that were more harmful. The the Antibiotic Era also led to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics used to treat very harmful infections, like the common cold, and influenza (flu). The overuse of antibiotics helped these infections and diseases become antibody resistant which is what scientist and doctors are dealing with currently.
In modern society our way of dealing with these issues are by using
vaccination, or by trying to cure them straight out. But by giving vaccinations
for infections like diphtheria, chicken pox, polio, tetanus, and measles, we
may be helping in the current situation, but at the same time producing strains
of antibody resistant microbes. In theory this may be detrimental to our generations in the years to come. As far as scientist and doctors trying to cure
diseases right from the start, there have been some issues following this as well. For example
when scientist and doctors tried to stop the spread of malaria with using
modern antimalarial medicine, the parasites that malaria contained, revolted
against it, because it became immune to the medicine, but it also created more
dangerous strands of parasites. This led to mutation of genes, which birthed
even more harmful diseases such as Sickle Cell Anemia, Thalassaemias, Duffy
Antigens, G6PD, and HLA and interleukin-4. Allow this is an example of just one example, this is an issue that follows the process of curing the most prominent diseases know to man, such as HIV/AIDS, and cancer. Bacteria is just becoming to smart...
In conclusion to put it simply as humans evolved with nature, so did microorganisms, and parasites. Which are still evolving as I write this blog. The real question is how will the evolution of smarter and more efficient humans lead to better engineering of preventive medicines?
Sources:
www.unmpress.com/more/0826330657.pdf
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704454304575081613327728110.html
http://www.cdc.gov/MALARIA/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1224522/?tool=pmcentrez