History of infections – never ending story

Summary

The optimistic dream of a "Golden Age without infections" remained a dream. To this day, as in the past, epidemics, or worse pandemics, caused by different infectious agents still emerge in various parts of the world. Reports of infectious diseases such as measles, tuberculosis, HIV, syphilis, cholera, and a persistently high incidence of malaria, including other transmissible diseases, continue to occur periodically, often accompanied by an increase in the number of affected people. Moreover, new infectious diseases are emerging, which of pathogens have not yet been reliably identified or are already known, but up to this time have been considered non-pathogenic to humans. However, the current pandemic of Covid-19 (Coronavirus disease) caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Coronaviridae) has proved to redirect biomedical research mainly to early diagnosis and rational therapy of respiratory viruses in particular, as well as to preventing their spreading not only by conventional means (limitation of direct contacts among persons, protection by masks, or by hand hygiene), but also by supporting of antiviral non-specific immunity. However, ensuring the rapid development of safe and effective vaccines is essential, by means of using the latest knowledge of contemporary biomedicine including that of molecular-genomic technologies (sequencing the genome of the SARS-CoV-2) with the hope that the newly constructed vaccines will be equally effective against genetic variants of the virus elicited by its expected mutations.

Keywords:

infectious diseases – epidemy – pandemic – eradication – anthropo-zoonoses – focus of infection – infections spread – Population growth – migration – intercontinental transport