THE FUTURE OF FEVERS

Globalisation has made it easier for pathogens to circulate through the movement of people and goods

- Pranay Lal

How did a virus, something we label as a nonliving obligate parasite, bring the world to a grinding halt? News from China suggests that the threat is looming again. Was the world's collective sigh of relief in September, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that the end of the pandemic may be in sight, premature? Should we begin to panic again? I don't think so but I cannot be certain. Nor, I suspect, can anybody with one hundred per cent accuracy. What I am certain about, though, is that the pathogen waiting in the wings is all of our making, a result of our transgressions with nature.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1945, Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, had presciently warned about the dangers of its misuse. But we began to use antibiotics indiscriminately-in hospitals and outside-often without a prescription. We used it to speed up the growth of our livestock and unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies sold antibiotics to unsuspecting poultry farmers, promising their efficacy in averting potential disease outbreaks. We looked unbeatable with our arsenal of antibiotics, and we got cocky.

Just 20 years after an Oxford policeman was first administered penicillin in 1941, reports of "resistance" to penicillin trickled in from hospitals around the world but Western pharmaceutical companies were convinced that with their growing arsenal of antibiotics, the end of the age of infectious diseases was in sight. The US surgeon general, William Stewart, declared in 1967 that it was time to "close the book on infectious disease". In this age of ebullient optimism, a popular medical textbook, considered a classic in its day, went so far as to claim that all infectious diseases would be eradicated by the year 2000. Cadres of young medical students and practitioners were made to believe they had to focus on more pressing emerging challenges.