“This period from the 1970s is without precedent in the history of the annals of medicine,” Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and Global Environment, told Knight-Ridder News Service.
Every hour 1,500 people worldwide die of an infectious disease, and more than half of these are children under 5, according to a 360-page report from the Institute of Medicine, a research arm of the federal government.
“The kinds of things we are doing for SARS we can anticipate we are going to do again and again,” Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee last week.
Indeed, Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Michigan, likened the battle against infectious diseases to wrestling. “We don’t conquer germs, he said. “We wrestle them to a draw.”
Top U.S. researchers, convened by the Institute of Medicine, have attributed the surge of new diseases to 13 changes in the world and the way people live.
These factors are:
A substantial proportion of the emerging diseases relate to man’s manipulation of ecology, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Knight-Ridder.
Lyme disease, for example, soared in the United States after land clearing drew white-tailed deer closer to humans, according to Stanford University medicine professor Dr. Stan Deresinski, editor of Infectious Disease Alert.
What’s more, many new diseases are strains of old diseases that have developed resistance to antibiotics, according to Dr. Fred Sparling, a medical and microbiology professor at the University of North Carolina and a co-author of the Institute of Medicine's report.
In the case of SARS the world’s penchant for travel also is a culprit. Doctors have been able to pinpoint tourists, businessmen and doctors who have taken the virus from Hong Kong to Hanoi, Singapore and Toronto.
Indeed, travel around the world can be completed in less than 80 hours, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and IOM committee co-chairman Joshua Lederberg wrote in an article titled “Infectious History.”
“Well over a million passengers, each one a potential carrier of pathogens, travel daily by aircraft to international destinations,” Lederberg wrote. “Because the transit times of people and goods now are so short compared to the incubation times of disease, carriers of disease can arrive at their destination before the danger they harbor is detectable, reducing health quarantine to a new absurdity.”
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