Hell yea! About damn time!
IN YOUR FACE NATURAL SELECTION!
On step closer to becoming true Great Old Ones. 8)
Don’t be too excited…
But still, the miraculous cocktail of drugs is expensive, costing $13 billion a year in developing countries alone, according to Reuters. That figure is expected to triple in 20 years–raising the worry that more sick people will not be able to afford treatment.
Well, apparently there’s a new drug that could prove effective against almost any virus:
That sounds like an autoimmune disease epidemic waiting to happen. 
No. It sounds like something worse 
So this new miracle drug kills viruses by telling infected cells that they should kill themselves. The way that a virus can evolve to defeat this defense is simple: Change the cell so it ignores this command. What do we usually call cells that ignore commands to commit suicide? Cancer cells.
Remember the brouhaha over HPV being found to cause cancer in certain cases, so now there’s a vaccine? This seems like it’s running the risk of encouraging virii to evolve around this by becoming carcinogenic.
Apparently gamers have made a breakthrough against AIDS:
How can they evolve if they die?
That’s the way it always works. That’s how resistance evolves. Pennicillin used to kill just about anything, now it’s mostly worthless. Cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy.
Cancer and virii have very high rates of mutation naturally, and something that kills 90+% of the population is going to make this even worse.
It will be a distressing rest of the century, yes.
I’m no doctor or anything, but I think that’s why the reason why the root cause of such things are isolated and then eradicated.
Look at smallpox. We’re well on our way of doing the same for rinderpest and the measles. There’s like a dozen viruses like these, being weeded out. If they became resurgent, they’d kill hundreds of millions again… but we’ve contained the crap outta of 'em (at least for developed nations). Largest concentration of smallpox on planet Earth, are in two specially designed buildings. Once we finally crack DNA in it’s entirety, we can code cancer out of our genes. If we achieve singularity, we’d just have mechanical bodies. Sure… not all attempts at eradication have worked. Yellow fever was a failed attempt, but the word “failure” in those cases means only the poorest nations still have them.
Really not so hopeless… just a matter of time in getting there (and the money to do it).