What diseases have actually been cured, and not just eradicated by vaccination?

Smallpox, and Polio have been eradicated by vaccination but they were never actually cured in any of the people who already had the disease.

It's been 27 years since the HIV pandemic began and we still don't have a cure, paraplegics still can't walk, Alzhiemer's and Parkinson's patients still have no cure. Muscular Dystrphy, hell even the common cold doesn't have a cure. I can't even think of one disease or condition that has actually been cured in the patients suffering from them.

Help me out here, can y'all name a few? I'm sure there are probably some examples of life threatening illnesses or debilitating conditions that have been cured but I'm just drawing a blank right now.

All great points. I'm drawing a blank as to a cured disease. It probably has something to do with the corporate policy: There is no money in a cure. As companies have realized over the years, there is much more profit in treating a disease. The cure is great, but doesn't help stockholders!

I wonder if a scientist has ever found a cure for something but was fired / silenced by managment, or dismissed as a quack? I would really like to think the world didn't work this way, but when you follow the money... maybe it doesn't lead to cures? I don't know

I think biotech companies should find permanent cures to all disease and then move away from the business of curing sick people to the business of improving healthy people. You know, gene therapy for penis enlargement, breast augmentation, life extension ext.

Many many bacterial diseases have been cured- think antibiotics.

Many people with cancer (particularly leukemias and lymphomas) have been cured by chemotherapy.

Anti-venom has saved many lives.

I think some of you are neglecting to think about diseases or serious illnesses that have been "cured" by antibiotics, such as tuberculosis, bubonic plague, and other bacterial diseases. Sure, some of the bacteria become resistant to certain antibiotics, but that is likely due, at least in part, to over-prescription and/or misuse.

In addition, there are drugs that have led to remission of various types of cancer (e.g. Gleevec/imatinib, used for treatment of GIST and chronic myeloid leukemia), gene therapy has restored the immune system in people with severe combined immunodeficiency (although the methodology was imperfect, causing several to then develop leukemia), enzyme replacement therapy can "cure" certain enzyme deficiencies, bone marrow transplantation has cured SCID or leukemia, and organ transplantation has "cured" those with organ failure. These are only a few examples that immediately spring to mind--I'm sure there are countless others.

However, as far as I know, none of these "cures" works for every person with the disease, due to person-to-person variation (not all people with the same disease have the same genetic defect, for example), lack of availability (in the case of tissue-matched organs), or lack of funds/insurance coverage/insurance reimbursement. In addition, many drugs or therapies lead to severe side effects or adverse reactions (e.g. leukemia, organ rejection, graft-versus-host disease), such that the "cure" can be worse than the disease. Maybe these are the real reasons that we have relatively few "cures," rather than some massive conspiracy in which companies make more money with expensive therapies for chronic conditions than for actual cures.

I should also mention that the definition of success cannot be merely limited to the complete eradication/cure of a disease; converting a previously fatal disease (e.g. HIV/AIDS) into a chronic, manageable disease should also be considered a success!

ElwalTS1040613 wrote:Smallpox, and Polio have been eradicated by vaccination but they were never actually cured in any of the people who already had the disease.

Polio has not been eradicated globally quite yet. It is still endemic in 4 countries.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs114/en/index.html

Vaccination cannot cure disease, it can only prevent. This is because of how the immune system works. It takes 5-7 days for T cells and B cells to recognize antigen (the virus or bacterial component) be activated, go through somatic hypermutation to increase affinity of antibodies (in B cells) and clonally expand to produce those antibodies, as well as larger numbers of T cells. Most of those cells become effector cells, but some of them become memory cells.

In all infectious disease, it is not the drug that cures, it is the immune system. In bacterial disease, antibiotics slow down reproduction and to a degree can kill bacterial populations. But what that accomplishes is to give the immune system a little help so that it can finish the job.

But let us digress to what a vaccine is. A vaccine is the presentation of material to the immune system in a form that can be responded to by adaptive immunity. Adaptive immunity is the process described above, and in a nutshell, a vaccine primes the immune system so that when the real thing comes along, it can expand an already adapted pool of memory cells. Think of it as like going to school. If you had to learn algebra in 10 days or you would die, well, maybe you would, and maybe you wouldn't. But if you went to school first, then sure, you'd do fine.

There are different types of vaccines. Attenuated viruses are the actual disease, but mutated so that it does not cause serious illness - polio and measles are exemplary of this type. Component vaccines present some partial antigen (protein or protein bound to lipids or sugars) flu vaccines and toxin vaccines like tetanus are examples. DNA vaccines inoculate with a gene or two of a disease, and get the cells to produce the foriegn protein themselves.

ElwalTS1040613 wrote:It's been 27 years since the HIV pandemic began and we still don't have a cure, paraplegics still can't walk, Alzhiemer's and Parkinson's patients still have no cure. Muscular Dystrphy, hell even the common cold doesn't have a cure. I can't even think of one disease or condition that has actually been cured in the patients suffering from them.

HIV is a special virus. For all the diseases for which there is a vaccine, those infected either clear the virus (measles, colds, flu, etcetera), establish immune system dominance over the virus, clearing it from most of the body (herpes, chicken pox), or establish antibodies to a critical toxin (tetanus), and thereby prevent "cure" the disease. (Even untreated tetanus can be survived ~45% mortality rate.) But HIV does not have clearance of the virus. HIV has very rare individuals, clinically called Long Term Non Progressors (LTNPs), who support high levels of virus, but do not develop low T cell counts. But they do not clear the virus. It is probable that those people are rare mutants, whose characteristics may not be duplicable in normal people. HIV mutates rapidly, so much that every cell that gets infected produces thousands of new mutants. Since it goes on so long in the body (7-20 years) the ecology of a single person becomes more complex than the ecology of mutants passed from person to person. (That can happen because the virus has a narrower set of requirements to infect another person than it does to infect cells within one person.) HIV also is a retrovirus, and large fractions of the cells that are infected will integrate into the DNA of infected cells. Some of those are memory cells with a half-life of 18 months or so. Do the math on that half-life (meaning half of those cells will die every 18 months) and it goes below one after decades from 1 million to 10 million cells to start with. Q = q x 0.5^( t/18 ) where Q is the number of cells left, q is the original quantity and t is the number of months. So if it were possible to stop all new infections of cells in someone with HIV, it would take 60-100 years for all of the latent cells to die off. This is why, after retroviral treatment, if a person stops taking their medications, the virus bounces back within a few months. Everything in literature at this point about HIV indicates that a cure is unlikely, and at best, fairly long term survival is going to be the (non-guaranteed) end point. There is reason to believe that a vaccine cannot work for HIV.

It has been 27 years in the developed world since we started recognizing HIV as a disease. But the virus appears to have been with us and our close relatives for a million years or more. Gorillas have it, chimpanzees carry it, other monkeys have it, or rather quite close relatives of our two main strains.

Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy, and Parkinsons disease are not caused by bacteria or viruses. While research exists trying to explore vaccination for alzheimer's, it has a basic problem called the blood-brain barrier. That barrier keeps the immune system out, except under rare conditions. We call the invasion of the brain by immune system cells encephalitis (which can also be caused by some direct infections) and usually the immune system does more damage than the disease does in the brain.

Paraplegia is caused by injury usually, and while the long term damage is partly immune system related, you would not want the treatment that would prevent any inflammation and cell death, since that would result in shutdown of the immune system and rapid death. So instead, one should focus on stem cells for repair, and prevention of damage by several days of low body temperature together with phenobarbital and piracetam. Once this early period is over, nerve cells stop dying.

The common cold is the product of a large pool of hundreds of viruses that are mutating and reassorting. (I am including influenza here, because it can give the same symptoms for many people.) The reason there is not a vaccine for all those viruses is because we have not spent the money to research them all and develop a vaccine for each one. It is questionable also whether it would be wise to do so, because of what is called "original antigenic sin". When you create antibodies to a virus, if you get an infection later with a mutant of that virus, your immune system will swing into action with memory antibodies rather than making new ones. Sometimes that can backfire, when the antibodies are good enough to "pass muster" as matching by the immune system, but not good enough to fully deactivate the virus in circulation. This leads to a protracted illness in some. Since colds are mostly non-fatal, it is probably best to just treat them symptomatically, and realize that we live in a complex ecology of diseases that we cannot entirely control.

ElwalTS1040613 wrote:Help me out here, can y'all name a few? I'm sure there are probably some examples of life threatening illnesses or debilitating conditions that have been cured but I'm just drawing a blank right now.

Probably the best example of that for vaccination is rabies, but it's in part due to an accident of viral biology. Rabies vaccination is delivered to a person as soon as possible after possible infection with the virus. If that is done, what happens is that the vaccination spurs the immune system to respond faster than the virus would. The rabies virus can manifest 2 weeks to a year or so after inoculation. Luckily, its progress is a little slow, and this allows the vaccine to prime the immune system in a week. So when the virus starts its reproduction in earnest, the immune system cells are already hard at work, and most people will not develop symptoms.

Understanding what a vaccine is will help you to understand the limitations of this method. Vaccines are not drugs. Vaccines are like education programs so that when you get into a real life situation your body knows what to do.

Bacterial diseases are cured by antibiotic treatment, but even there we're losing ground as common pathogenic bacteria become increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics.

Yes, potential cures are kept away from patients. A simple, inexpensive compound (dichloroacetate; see http://www.thedcasite.com/ or search PubMed) already approved for treating a rare metabolic disorder has been shown to be highly effective against some cancers, but no oncologist is using it clinically because there's no money in it for pharmaceutical companies, and only pharmas can afford the expense of clinical trials. The same holds true for so-called "neutraceuticals," natural components of foods and traditional medicinal plants that people take for their supposed health benefits. Some such products have shown promise, without apparent toxicity, against a variety of common health problems. The pharmas are trying to have the FDA declare them "drugs" so they'll be pulled from the market until/unless they're shown safe and effective in clinical trials, which won't happen unless the pharmas can figure a way to patent and profit from them.

Even treatments that don't cure, but would interfere with companies' profits, are kept out of the hands of patients. Diabetes has no cure. Insulin supplementation, no matter how administered, cannot approach the body's normal moment-by-moment response to changes in serum glucose and other physiologic signals. The anti-diabetic drugs pushed on Type 2 diabetics just postpone their starting insulin treatment, and their side effects - severe gastrointestinal upset and, for the thiazolidinediones, increased abdominal fat storage - can be more unpleasant than self-administering several injections a day. The costs associated with uncomplicated diabetes are substantial, when you consider lancets and test strips or cartridges for measuring blood glucose up to 6 times a day; patented drugs; insulin delivery systems ranging from disposable syringes and needles to pumps with infusion sets that must be replaced twice a week; and frequent doctor visits. A needle-free, air-powered, refillable insulin "pen" (with no disposables) is available in Europe, but US manufacturers have succeeded in preventing its approval here. Likewise, blood testing systems that can approximate glucose levels based on some physical parameter that doesn't require pricking the skin or use of disposable test strips have been kept off the US market, supposedly because of their lower accuracy; but they're accurate enough to warn of dangerous highs or lows, they'd reduce the frequency of painful sticking, and standard glucose monitoring would remain as a backup. If a cure were found for diabetes or for atherosclerosis (statins are probably the top-selling prescription drugs on the market), it wouldn't make it through Phase II clinical trials before it would drop out of sight. The pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers of related products couldn't afford to allow its release.

Rabies vaccine? Other vaccines that work in between exposure to the pathogen and actual establishment of infection?

inborn errors of metabolism (PKU, etc)
some of the mucopoylsaccharidoses (with degrading enzymes, iduronidase)
Losarten is looking good for Marfans
many vitamin deficiencies
scurvey (vitamin C)
Pellagra (niacin, tryptophan)
scientific knowledge has led to the possibility to prevent colon cancer, HIV, most lung cancer and much type II diabetes
Parasitic diseases (giardia, etc)
Some fungal diseases
loss of limb (artificial limbs have greatly improved)
poor eye sight (corneal implants, lasix, contact lenses)
poor hearing (hearing aids, cochlear implants)
arrythmia (pacemakers)
I could go on............

I could see that "diseases" and "cured" could be broadly defined to encompass ills that have basis in psychological, nutrient deficiency, natural and xenobiotic toxicants, and non-human victims, as well as the standard genetic, biochemical, and pathological agents of humans that would be brought to mind.

An alternate interpretation of the question is that it asks "Which diseases have been cured by vaccination and not just eradicated by vaccination?" and was intended to pertain only to human diseases. That would greatly reduce the selections unless you included mental conditioning as a psychological form of vaccination.

Can a vaccine cure already infected/suffering patients or just prevent healthy people from getting the disease, or both?

ElwalTS1040613 wrote:Smallpox, and Polio have been eradicated by vaccination but they were never actually cured in any of the people who already had the disease.

It's been 27 years since the HIV pandemic began and we still don't have a cure, paraplegics still can't walk, Alzhiemer's and Parkinson's patients still have no cure. Muscular Dystrphy, hell even the common cold doesn't have a cure. I can't even think of one disease or condition that has actually been cured in the patients suffering from them.

Help me out here, can y'all name a few? I'm sure there are probably some examples of life threatening illnesses or debilitating conditions that have been cured but I'm just drawing a blank right now.

Vaccines are designed to provide a boost to immunity and not a cure for a disease.

ElwalTS1040613 wrote:Can a vaccine cure already infected/suffering patients or just prevent healthy people from getting the disease, or both?

that would depend on how chronic the disease is and what the natural history 9time course) of it is. Takes time to launch an effective immune response.

It takes 5-7 days for immune response to show its effects.

Also - polio has not been eradicated. Only one disease has been eradicated and that is smallpox.

EllenTS1006644 wrote:It takes 5-7 days for immune response to show its effects.

Also - polio has not been eradicated. Only one disease has been eradicated and that is smallpox.

True. It is a goal to eradicate polio through vaccination that has yet to be achieved.

Smallpox has not been eradicated by vaccination, but natural eradicated. My guess there is the principle of the dynamic relationship between pathogen and environment. Mathematics model P = f.En ( P = Pathogen, En = Environment ).

to the previous poster:
you are delusional.

Google Donald Henderson

Thank you. God bless you.

All my best,
GatotS

Returning to the subject:
I cannot cite a single disease that at its clinical manifestation can be cured by vaccination.
This include the many diseases that can be prevented by vaccination prior infection/initiation (e.g. all classical childhood diseases, influenza) and the diseases that can be stopped from progressing to clinical manifest disease upon contamination (e.g. rabies, tetanus).

In contrast to vaccination, other therapeutic interventions (e.g. antibiotics, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, antiviral agents) have been proven to be effective against established disease.

Thus I would state
a curative vaccine does not work

From an immunological point of view this is not all too surprising. Vaccine trigger the initiation of a specific immune response, like most - if not all - diseases do. The difference resides in the fact that the vaccine does this without clinical disease. Thereby allowing immunity to rise before the onset of mortality. Theories of B and T lymphocyte immunity, show that specific immune responses require quite some time to develop due to their clonal nature and the required cell divisions.

When people have the flue, rabies, AIDS, cancer, simply initiating an immune response against influenza virus, HIV, rabies virus, tumor related antigens will not be sufficient to cure the disease. Actually the body has already initiated an immune response, which could not prevent the onset of clinical disease.

In clinical manifest disease, scientist have to be more creative to be able to boost curative responses.

John

http://www.jjljacobs.tk/