Infectious diseases have become less prominent as causes of death and disability in regions of improved sanitation and adequate supplies of antibiotics.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.
In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.
I think that the discoveries of antibiotics and vaccines have contributed to the improvement of the quality of life, making it possible to prevent contagious diseases.
Medicine has changed greatly in the last decades. Widespread vaccinations have practically eradicated many illnesses, at least in western Europe and the United States. The use of chemotherapy, especially the antibiotics, has contributed to an ever decreasing number of fatalities in infectious diseases.
In today's world, it is shortsighted to think that infectious diseases cannot cross borders. By allowing developing countries access to generic drugs, we not only help improve health in those nations, we also help ourselves control these debilitating and often deadly diseases.
I have spent too long with too many people who have lost loved ones to healthcare-associated infections not to be determined to act on this. There is no tolerable level of preventable infections. The only acceptable strategy is a zero-tolerance strategy.
Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.
I am very puzzled by the fact that young people are getting infected again. They don't take precautions despite an enormous amount of information. It's like riding a race car at 200 kilometers an hour. Some people like the risk.
A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor.
Hospital-acquired infections are now killing more people every year in the United States than die from AIDS or cancer or car accidents combined - about 100,000.