Question: so you science will help lots of people learn and cure genetic diseses, and will we ever find a cure for for some diseses that do not have a chance at the momet, or mabye lengthen the time some people have on earth?

Amelia Markey answered on 22 Jun 2011:

New treatments and cures for diseases are being developed all of the time but some big ones still remain!

Some types of cancers are still very hard to treat and the cancer cells can become resistant to the drugs very quickly. Another difficult infection/disease is HIV/AIDS. There are a lot of drugs to help treat patients with HIV and prolong their lifespan but again the HIV virus can become resistant to these drugs so new ones need to be made. A better solution would be to develop a vaccine to prevent people from getting HIV but this is a very difficult task! There are several reasons why HIV is so difficult to treat but one of the biggest is that the virus can insert its DNA into your DNA and hide there which makes it difficult for your body to recognise it is infected and there are no HIV cells for your body or a drug to kill.

Hopefully one day we will have found treatments or preventative methods for some of these diseases. Only recently a new vaccine was developed to prevent cervical cancer, you may have heard about it on the news!
A disease that has been completely eradicated is Smallpox. The last naturally occurring case of was in October 1977 and the global eradication of smallpox was certified by a commission of scientists on December 9, 1979 and endorsed by the World Health Assembly on May 8, 1980.