Please don't take offense at this, I've really tried to put the following as politely as I can. I won't kiss your butt, but I won't lie to you either:

Sue, that's the paranoia or a lack of knowledge talking. I really hope the latter.

The "common" cold is caused by a collection of viruses that get lumped together becuase they all cause the same symptoms. You'd need a vaccine that would work against every possible virus for that to work, and that's just flat out impossible.

As for cancer, uhmmmm.... We are developing vaccines for it. Maybe you've not heard about the new one for certain forms of cervical cancer? A large part (but by no means all) of developing cancer is having genetic markers- screening will tell you if you've got the gene, but that involves modifying the human genome pre-birth and gene therapy which no one wants to put money into for fear that it might offend some luddite. And even if we could beat that (and maybe cure baldness in a similar manner), you can't rule out exposure to various triggers which we still don't understand.

Let's be honest with ourselves. We've only known what a virus IS for about a hundred and thirty years. About the same time, people generally started living long enough that they could develop cancer. And it's only been about 80 years that most people have been able to say that they've been to a doctor PERIOD over the course of thier lives.

By comparison, we've known about birds since the first primates, but it still took Homo sapiens until the 1850s to understand how an wing works and another 50 years to figure out how to apply it. Even if we want to start with the Greeks and their Chinese counterparts as the "start" of science, that's still a little over two thousand years just to figure out the basics, 50 to apply them, and 30 for it to become common place.

Keep in mind, we still don't understand all the causes of cancer and what viruses cause the "common cold"- we are between where Euler observed what lift was and where Bernoulli determined how lift works. We can't even entirely explain why aspirin works the way it does and we've been using that, in commercial form, for over a century!

This reminds me of people [censored] at me becuase the computer doesn't do what they want it to, even when they admit that it did what they told it to. But it wasn't what they wanted it to do. What? You think you can wish techology into being? I really wish we could, so I could take a pill and get my hairline back. The lack of understanding about science, and the general fear/worship of it, in this culture is frightful. That a veterinarian, supposedly a man of science, would have this view point is disappointing.