r/NoStupidQuestions • u/notatoastedbread We're all learning • 23h ago
Assuming the world magically agreed to a 4 week self quarentine, which diseases could be eliminated with this global effort?
This question also assumes the resources to implement this, like providing housing and food for everyone, would be offered. I'm curious strictly from the disease control point of view.
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u/ScienceAndGames 22h ago
Well it’s easier to rule out what diseases wouldn’t be eradicated.
Anything environmentally or animal transmitted. So anything in the soil (Tetanus) or water or anything like bird flu.
Anything with a contagious lifespan in the body of more than a month, plenty of diseases stick around for ever like Herpes.
Anything that can survive on surfaces for more than a few weeks like C. diff
Any opportunistic ones that are generally harmless and often living in or on your body until conditions change and they become disease causing.
All in all, most diseases would find some way to persist
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u/SeaGoat24 18h ago
plenty of diseases stick around for ever like Herpes
Just a minor nitpick, but herpesviruses and retroviruses are the only infectious diseases that stick around forever, so I would argue 'plenty' is the wrong word to use here.
The former is incurable because it infects nerve ganglions then goes dormant with occasional flares (e.g. chickenpox initial infection into shingles flares), and the latter because it alters the DNA of your cells (fun fact: there's a portion of the human genome that is entirely inherited retroviral DNA, and we don't really know what it does).
I guess you could argue that things like rabies and CJD stick around forever, but only because they're unavoidable death sentences at present. TB is another potential candidate as it does have a latent state, but there are curative treatments so it's not quite the same as retroviruses and herpesviruses.
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u/ThePeaceDoctot 11h ago
fun fact: there's a portion of the human genome that is entirely inherited retroviral DNA, and we don't really know what it does.
You can in fact inherit entire, intact dormant viruses form your parents without ever being directly infected by them, and have those viruses be activated by environmental factors, becoming reinfected with a virus you never actually encountered in the first place.
I find that really cool, but I can't explain why.
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u/ScienceAndGames 17h ago
I was also including ones that are curable but are lifelong if untreated but I can see how my choice of herpes as an example wouldn’t indicate that.
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u/nx01a 13h ago
What about Norovirus? I'll never forget how sick I got with that one...
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u/ScienceAndGames 4h ago
It can remain viable in contaminated water for months, so all it would take is a few infected wells for it to survive easily.
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u/Lucky-Crow-3510 23h ago
none. 4 weeks is too short for most incubated microbes
vaccines can do that because they basically make almost everyone immune in the first place, so the disease cannot spread and naturally dies out.
It's a bit like burning down a small piece of forest to stop a wildfire. same thing.
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u/Efficient-State-7300 23h ago
What minimum would yield some useful results?
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u/marlee_dood 23h ago
I’d say at least a few months.
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u/AshaNyx 22h ago
Plus a quarantine on everyone moving between countries for years
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u/marlee_dood 22h ago
Many viruses take years to be evident and can lay dormant for decades. We would have to close off travelling completely at that point. But even still, within groups low-lying viruses will survive.
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u/zephyreblk 21h ago
Also the reason why the melting of permafrost is problematic because we may encounter new dormant virus. Virus aren't living beings.
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u/RubyDustxox 13h ago
The problem isnt the humans, its all the animal reservoirs. Most of these diseases live in mosquitos, rodents, bats, birds. You could quarantine every person on earth for a year and the second you walk outside a mosquito bites you and malarias right back. only stuff thats human has a shot, which is basically what smallpox and polio are.
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u/jackalopeswild 10h ago
Vaccines can't do this bc we can't vaccinate everyone simultaneously. It's not even close.
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u/Harper_Joness 18h ago
Measles is the cleanest answer, maybe smallpox too if you’re counting history. In a 4 week quarantine, you’d only wipe out stuff with a short incubation, no animal reservoir, and no long-lived carriers, so once the last infected person clears out the chain dies. Things like TB, hepatitis, cholera, norovirus, anything with animals or water or soil in the mix would hang around
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u/DifficultCurrent7 21h ago
Well advanced old age with dementia would certainly dwindle. Think of all those really frail elderly folks reliant on others for medicine, care and food. Alot of them would probably die if left to themselves for 4 days, even if left with food and medication, they might not have the capacity to actually use it.
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u/SubstantialKBB 23h ago
We've done that before. None.
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u/Wise-Matter9248 22h ago
We didn't though, not really. Even in pretty strict areas there wasn't 100% quarantine. Because thousands of people would have starved.
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u/Noof42 Stupid 21h ago
B Yamagata influenza probably went extinct because of the lockdowns and such.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/a-flu-strain-has-likely-gone-extinct-since-2020
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u/LuxTheSarcastic 21h ago
In 2020 people where I live were going out coughing on faces because they thought it was a hoax.
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u/TillPsychological351 23h ago edited 22h ago
Measles. The maximum incubation period is 21 days (but usually less), and there's no known animal reservoir. It requires direct human-to-human transmission, and it doesn't persist very long in the environment. And unlike chicken pox or herpes simplex, there's no asymptomatic carrier state, once you recover, the virus is truly cleared.
Of course, there's a much easier way we could have eliminated measles by now...
For similar reasons, smallpox could have been eliminated using a global quarantine method. But we wisely chose a more practical option.