“If you fell unconscious in 1950, no one around you would know how to perform CPR: it wouldn’t be invented for another 10 years. Or take type 1 diabetes, where survival would involve injecting yourself every day with a thick glass syringe of insulin that was extracted from animal pancreases (with tens of thousands of animals required to produce each pound of insulin). And hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide would catch polio each year, leaving them paralyzed, often needing an iron lung to help them breathe,” notes Saloni Dattani:
Fast forward another thirty years to 1980, and polio would be eliminated in many rich countries through vaccination. Smallpox would be eradicated worldwide. Insulin could now be manufactured by yeast in bulk in bioreactors, and emergency care would look completely different: with implantable pacemakers, AEDs, and coronary bypass surgery.
But you could still die from cancers caused by stomach ulcers, which we now know are typically caused by H. pylori infection and treatable with antibiotics. Or take hepatitis C – a deadly infection that causes liver fibrosis and cancer – which is now curable with antivirals in around 98% of patients.
Some of the most fatal conditions we’ve known, like HIV/AIDS and cystic fibrosis2, are also now highly treatable; taking early treatment for them returns people to near-normal life expectancies. Insulin treatment has advanced to the point that small wearable devices can monitor sugar levels in the blood and release insulin to stabilize them in real time.
People in the poorest countries have benefited even more, in terms of rising life expectancy. Life expectancy in Africa has risen dramatically, from around 46 years in 2000 to over 64 years by 2025, aided by reduced child mortality, improved sanitation, and vaccinations.
Malaria vaccines are saving thousands of lives in Africa.
Last year, a treatment was discovered for sleeping sickness, a disease that kills 50,000 to 500,000 people in Africa each year. Sleeping sickness is an awful disease that begins with fever and aches. Then things get worse. The parasite that causes the disease will disrupt sleeping patterns and cause aggressiveness and psychosis. The death rate from sleeping sickness is close to 100%, if it is untreated.
The customary treatment for sleeping sickness was also quite awful: a drug that is toxic to the kidneys, followed by an arsenic-based drug that’s toxic to the brain. The treatment kills up to a tenth of all patients. But thanks to a recent discovery, people can take the drug fexinidazole to treat the disease instead.
For many years, therapy would begin with a lumbar puncture to see if the parasite has invaded the central nervous system, followed by injections of a drug that damages your kidneys, followed by an arsenic-based drug that harms your brain. But scientists have discovered that fexinadazole can be used to treat sleeping sickness, first the chronic variety, and more recently for acute sleeping sickness as well.
