is AIDS research actually going backwards?

[Guest guest]

Horgan argues that in some areas, science and technology are moving in the

wrong direction. Among those areas are space colonization, the origin of life,

and ending infectious disease.

Decades ago antibiotics, vaccines, pesticides, water chlorination and other

public health measures were vanquishing diseases such as malaria, yellow fever,

polio, whooping cough, tuberculosis and smallpox, particularly in First World

nations. In The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance

(Penguin, 1995), the journalist Laurie Garrett noted that in 1967 U.S. Surgeon

General said that it was " time to close the books on infectious

diseases " (Garrett's words) and shift resources toward non-infectious killers

such as cancer and heart disease. The global eradication of smallpox in 1979

seemed to fulfill 's vision. Hopes for the end of infectious disease were

soon crushed, however, by the emergence of AIDS, mutant flu viruses and

antibiotic-resistant forms of old killers such as tuberculosis.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=scientific-regress-when-scien\

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