"Preston told CBS News that months after leaving the jungle, he noticed a bug bite that simply wouldn’t go away. And so did half his team members. Eventually, the National Institutes of Health diagnosed them with Leishmaniasis — a rare parasitic disease — and the team was forced to undergo treatment"
So I looked at wikipedia, and the article [1] there says:
"About 12 million people are currently infected in some 98 countries. About 2 million new cases and between 20 and 50 thousand deaths occur each year. About 200 million people in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and southern Europe live in areas where the disease is common."
Not unusual indeed.
> Leishmaniasis is mostly a disease of the developing world, and is rarely known in the developed world outside a small number of cases
So, not rare for where they visited, but rare for where they live (and where the diagnosis happened).
They literally were taking poison and hoping that they would outlive the parasite under those conditions. In the case where a parasite might be hiding anywhere in your body this is probably still the only thing you can really hope to do, but it feels like trying to burn down your house to get rid of a rat infestation.
Chemo is poison that effects cancer cells slightly more severely then healthy cells.
So anyway, especially the neurology course was kind of depressing. Basically, apart from watching and treating a few symptoms, and maybe delaying symptoms (the main example being Parkinson's and brain implants), there is nothing that can be done.
Looking at the state of medicine I'm reminded of the movie "City of Ember" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970411/), where survivors of the nuclear apocalypse were placed in an underground city, and the movie starts a few hundred years later when their (1960s level) technology and especially their power plant starts falling apart after many, many repairs. The engineers there, with no access to make anything new, only the supply they were given at the beginning, are like doctors, and the machinery like human bodies. You start with what you are given and it all goes downhill from there, with more or less horrible kludges and hacks around arising problems along the way.
When you see scifi movies and shows where any ailment can be cured with 5 minutes in a machine, it's still a far away dream from where we are now. In a way, it's also full of hope.
The article says the explorers don't believe it's practical to make the journey - but aren't they operating from a paradigm which is on a continuum from weekend camping trips? It seems past time to treat Earth's inhospitable zones with an eye towards the difficulties and solutions of space exploration.
"Budget."
(or, at least, this is what I imagine the answer is.)
> It seems past time to treat Earth's inhospitable zones with an eye towards the difficulties and solutions of space exploration.
Apollo had some major issues with moon dust and such - maintaining a sterile environment is a different, if overlapping skillset with maintaining an environment within a vacuum.
That said, there's all the NBC preparedness of the military, and e.g. the medical response to outbreaks and quarantines - even if "don't enter the quarantined area" is rule 1.
But hey, maybe Robots could be an option at some point. Still - do you fund the expedition that requires expensive, custom, bespoke explorer-bots (because there hasn't been much of a market for those for mass production to drive down costs or standardize things) or do you fund the expedition where you can send a few students for school credit?
