New infectious diseases will continue to emerge

Dozens of new infectious diseases are likely to emerge over the next 25 years unless humans acquire an ecological perspective on infectious diseases rather than seeing microbes as simply an invading entity that should be blindly attacked with antibiotics or used as a tool for biological warfare, a conference was told last week.

Professor Tony McMichael, of the Australian National University, Canberra, said that the emergence and spread of 35 new or newly diagnosed infectious diseases in the past 25 years was a product of our modern way of …