Cancer, germs, viruses, human life-span ...and now dementia

What we learn matters

Something amazing happened with the creation of modern medicine. Our human life remained the same from prehistoric times, past the Neanderthals, through the Romans, the Middle Ages and up through the American Revolution.

More and more of the same for millions of years:

Lots of children died early,
and enough people died early that an average life lasted about 30 years.

And then it changed.

Short version; TLDR:

As medicine got better at one thing, our bodies and our knowledge ran smack into the next big problem. We fix one thing that keeps humans alive longer. Then we uncover and fix the next big weakness in the human body.

The 2025 keynote speech was about just this subject at the graduation ceremony for Indiana University Medical School. (And by the way, IU Medical School is the largest in the entire USA). Their honored speaker, Dr Paul Klotman, is the President, CEO and Executive Dean of Baylor College of Medicine and is himself a world renowned researcher on the things that kill us (pathogens).

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Humans got longer lives

How we got here

Human lifespan began to change in the 1800s. One of the first big improvements was from Dr John Snow who mapped the location of sick and dying people during the 1854 London cholera epidemic.

His map tracked people dying from cholera and proved that the water pump handle at one public well was the source of most of the infections. They removed the pump handle and stopped the cholera epidemic. That tracking where disease happens and spreads is now called the science of epidemiology.

Steps on the way

Take another look at the chart that starts this webpage.

A. First improvement: the 1854 London cholera epidemic ended when Dr John Snow removed the pump handle from the public well. He mapped when and where people became ill to find the source of the infection

B. Discovery and understanding of germs became widespread as Louis Pasteur developed a process to protect milk and our food supply from bacteria.

C. In 1860 Dr Joseph Lister developed sterile surgical procedures that allowed people to begin surviving surgery. He still gets credit in the product name Listerine.

D. Antibiotics were discovered. Fortunately antibiotics continue to be slowly invented.

E. In the 1900s the largest increase in human life came from vaccines that reduced childhood deaths. Before vaccines about 30% of all children died before age six. Child deaths dropped dramatically after vaccines were being given worldwide. After major vaccines only about 2% of children died. That is the single biggest improvement humans have ever made.

F. Once people began to live longer, we developed medications and technology to manage chronic diseases. These are the ongoing problems where there is no cure - only medications lifestyle changes for the rest of your now-much-longer life. Examples on the chart are:

F1 high blood pressure,

F2 diabetes,

F3 and cardiac issues.

Next big problems in a longer life

The single biggest improvement in life span so far: vaccines

Generally, they stimulating the immune system to produce a response that protects against infection or avoids becoming very sick from a specific virus or other pathogen. Just like the military trains soldiers to recognize the outline or shapes of enemy tanks, planes or ships — our immune system learns the outlines and shapes of a virus or bacteria.

This training of our immune system by vaccines gives the human body some head start in the fight against disease when exposed to the virus or pathogen.

Here is a poor analogy on how we got here

1st step: Important as the invention of the wheel

Historically, most vaccines, such as those against measles, polio, and yellow fever, were made from killed or weakened whole viruses. This is the old story about milkmaids exposed to the mild cowpox disease who avoided much more deadly smallpox.

2nd step: Vaccines move up to horse and buggy speeds

In more recent years, vaccines based on viral parts rather than whole viruses have been developed. These types of vaccines, such as those for hepatitis B and the human papillomavirus, use only genetic pieces so our body learns to recognize and then build our own antibodies to block the virus.

3rd step: Finding “Interstate highway” levels of vaccine performance

Other types of vaccines, such as the first versions against the Ebola virus, use a harmless virus as a transport carrying only a part of the disease-causing virus into the body. Again this teaches our cells to produce specific proteins as part of our immune response against the illness.

Next: Related therapies take flight

Each of these older types of vaccines, however, have manufacturing requirements that make them difficult to produce quickly for a disease outbreak, hard to develop a personal therapy just for your body, or protect against an entirely new pandemic virus.

New answers around 2010

These next steps use new techniques from the mid-to-late 2000s that used to create vaccines against the Zika virus. Then in the 2010s, scientists began to study the coronavirus responsible for MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and used these same techniques to develop other specific new vaccines. Another major disease pandemic was avoided. The solution they found came from advances in nanotechnology: the development of fatty droplets (lipid nanoparticles) that wrapped the mRNA like a bubble. This allowed entry of fragile parts into the cells. Once inside the cell, the mRNA message could be translated into proteins, and the immune system would then be primed to recognize the foreign virus.

The first vaccines using these fatty envelopes were developed against the deadly Ebola virus, but since that virus is only found in a limited number of African countries, it had no commercial development for a long time in the U.S.

Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Sickle cell and even individual cancer meds

All this work from the 1960’s to 2005 to now has started to allow custom medications aimed at specific cancer cells and other disease. One example is targeting your own individual cancer cells — a step beyond chemo or radiation treatment that may be too-big, too-broad.

Bottom line

Customized delivery that teaches your own body how and when use its own proteins to protect itself means we are using less invasive medications and treatments.

The increased flexibility and ease with which mRNA vaccines can be developed also led scientists to believe that the technology may be used to play a future role against other emerging infectious diseases and in treating sickle-cell disease, multiple sclerosis and even more forms of cancer.

Into the future

We will find other problems that get in the way of longer, happier human lives. Fix dementia, fix some of the cancers, fix some of the degenerative diseases: that is all great. There will be some other unknown problem that pops up — something that limits humans in our game of life.

Good news for the future: Doctors are really good at "Whack-A-Mole".

The physicians at House Call Doctor Thousand Oaks are superb and happy to discuss your concerns.

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