The molecular biologist against infectious disease. Infectious diseases, in both the developing and the developed world, still pose considerable challenges to biomedical research. But science alone is clearly not sufficient to overcome the burden of disease in the world.

Abstract

Infectious disease is one aspect of worldwide public health in which molecular biologists could bring about real change and improve the overall quality of life for many people. There are identified targets—be they viruses, bacteria or other agents—that are sufficiently different from the human body for specific intervention. And, indeed, major achievements show that this is possible: the big killers of the past—including smallpox, cholera and typhoid fever—have been eliminated from the globe, or at least from the developed world, and families do not need to worry about a newborn child dying of whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever or meningitis. However, many other infectious diseases have not disappeared, either in individuals or globally. The reasons are manifold: for some diseases the science is not straightforward, but, more frustratingly, the means by which the advances taking place through molecular biology could be implemented are not in place for other diseases. > The excessive number of deaths and disease is part of the pathology of poverty The diseases that still cause the greatest concern have many different profiles. There are everyday ailments, such as the common cold and other respiratory or gastrointestinal infections, which are especially common in children and continue to cause discomfort, worry, need of medical services and use of antibiotics in the developed world. The same infections are equally or even more abundant in developing countries, with the essential difference of being highly likely to cause death. Mild or even asymptomatic infections might predispose the sufferer to diseases that are not generally considered to be infectious in origin, such as gastric ulcers, many types of carcinoma, and perhaps even atherosclerosis and juvenile diabetes. In the developing world, high‐profile diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, are devastating in terms of the numbers of people infected and lethality, and parasitic infections, …