• Question: By curing diseases that have helped to control world population, won't this cause the population to boom thus using up our resources?

    Asked by to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 14 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Some people think this might be a problem, but what we actually see is quite different! In countries like Britain where lots of diseases can be cured, couples tend to choose to have fewer children. (I think the average is actually less than two now!) In poorer countries where there is still lots of disease, couples choose to have more children because they know some of them will die before the grow up. So I don’t think curing disease will cause a population spike in the long run.

    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Yes this would cause the population to go up. But as Francesca says, people are now having less babies. So although the number of people in the world is still increasing now, scientists predict that the population might stabilise in about 30 years.

    • Photo: Deepak Kar

      Deepak Kar answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      That is an interesting question. I guess it can work both ways – there are countries with a high rate of population increase (India, China) and there are countries with a steady population (Europe, North America) . So for the latter, it is not a problem. Even for the former, you can think that once someone goes to school and, acquires an education, gets a job, the government already spent money for that. Then if that person lives longer, (s)he can be more helpful to the society!

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 16 Mar 2014:

      It will cause populations to go up, but usually when this happens people naturally opt to have less children, which means that the number of people actually stays the say or sometimes decreases. Plus by curing diseases people have longer and happier lives, which is a good thing I think.

    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      I think everyone has agreed and answered this here. Hopefully if this were to happen we wouldn’t have enforce any rule like in China where they have the one child policy to stop over population but we do need to make sure we don’t have too much of a population boom as we struggle to have enough food on the Earth for everyone as it is!

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