Diseases. Good or Bad? Well....

Lets start off with an important fact that really is the basis for this entire posting.

There is no such thing as "Dying of old age". If anyone tell you otherwise, slap them in the mouth and say "That's from Kris".

"But Kris, if you can't die from old age, what do you do die from?"

Well there's lots of ways. You can get in a car accident, slip on some ice, get shot or stabbed, drink yourself too death, infections, viruses, drown, fire, become exploded (yes i know that's not gramatically correct, it just sounds funner that way) you get the point though. Then there's the way you usually die when you get old: The Dreaded Disease.

So what kinds of Diseases are there? That's a loaded question. There are many forms and types of diseases. There are Infectious Diseases (black plague). Genetic Diseases (some types of Heart Disease), Circulatory disease (Raynauds Disease, I have this). Mainly we're looking though at some of the big ones, starting with the ticker.

So they say Heart Disease kills 1 in 4 people. This means according to this statistic that 25% of the populations deaths can be accounted for by a failing heart. This doesn't specify what type of hearth disease as there are many types, but there we have it.

I'm *pretty sure* this is the big one. Kidney disease is pretty high up there from what I understand. Lung disease such as pheumonia is common is older people.

So lets break this down. Pretty much every method of dying has a cause to prevent or stop it. If you can die from it, there's a group that wants to protect you from it. Which is great. Scientific advancements lead to longer lives, higher quality of life, etc. But how far does it go?

Eventually it breaks down to you simply can't cure all diseases. You can't stop every way that we die. If you do, people start becoming immortal.

Now this is probably a point where a lot of people go "what's so bad about that, dont you want to live forever Kris?" SURE I DO!! I'd love to live until the first FTL drives becomes active. Watch Mars get colonized. Hopefully Alien encouters. See what technology does in the future. But that's not what life does. The day that we create a system that allows for immortality is the day that we halt mandkinds evolution in this universe. A living being can not evolve. Evolution takes place over millions of years because death is allowed to occur, because Evolution takes place by people growing up, having children, having your children become slightly better than you, and then your genetic code dying off, allowing for the species to advance.

That's the problem with diseases. We cant "cure" all diseaeses. We can't stop death. It's required unfortunately.

Now, DONT take this as me saying that we should stop all research. I might be saying death is needed, but seeing a 7yr old girl dying of Kidney failure if there's a way to prevent that is not needed. A 40yr old dying of a heart attack should be something preventable. And Diseases like MS and Alzheimers are just dumb.

In the end, you're going to Die. No matter how rich or poor, famous or unknown, awesome or not. What's important isn't that we find ways to fight disease to cure them all, but at the least to give people the lives they deserve to live.