alt Hacker NewsMost of the conditions you've mentioned there have exogenous causes (i.e. diseases or environmental toxins), and I question your inclusion of many of the ones that don't (who thinks we have "conquered" breast cancer??).
But we have made very little progress in staving off degenerative-type diseases. Even the primary degenerative disease you mention, knee failure, we cure largely with a wholesale replacement. That obviously isn't applicable to organs we can't just swap out.
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Swapping out organs may be an option in the future. I'm getting a bioengineering degree so I can't work in organ engineering research. We're definitely not there yet, but there's a lot of interesting research happening in this area.
I agree. Rates of cancer and diabetes are up. We might have better treatments than in the past, but I though I even saw graphs showing that overall cancer fatalities rates are flat - a lower percentage of people die from it, but the increase in cases mostly offsets that (depends on the specific type).
"Conquered" is a loaded term, but a 43% reduction in mortality since 1990 is nothing to sneeze at.
The 5 year survival rate for localized (early stage) breast cancer is 99%
Did we remove it as a cause of death? No. But the prognosis is much less dire by now than it was even a few decades ago.
Very few causes are ever completely "conquered", they just move down in relative relevance.