Hygiena 2021, 66(2):48-54 | DOI: 10.21101/hygiena.a1779

Epidemics, pandemics: lessons learned from the history of infections

Vladimír Bencko¹, Petr Šíma², Milena Bušová¹

¹ Univerzita Karlova, 1. lékařská fakulta, Ústav hygieny a epidemiologie a Všeobecná fakultní nemocnice, Praha, Česká republika

² Akademie věd ČR, Mikrobiologický ústav, Laboratoř imunoterapie, Praha, Česká republika

Global reports of infectious diseases show that measles, tuberculosis, HIV, syphilis, cholera, a persistently high incidence of malaria and other transmissible diseases continue to occur periodically, often accompanied by an increase in the number of affected people. Moreover, new infectious diseases are emerging whose aetiology has not been reliably identified or have been considered non-pathogenic to humans. The current pandemic of Covid-19 caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has highlighted the necessity of redirecting biomedical research to early diagnosis and rational therapy of respiratory viruses in particular, as well as prevention of their spread by conventional means: limitation of direct contact among persons, protection by masks, hand hygiene, testing and tracing and quarantine of positively tested persons and their contacts. Ensuring the rapid development of safe and effective vaccines by means of the latest findings of contemporary biomedicine, including that of molecular-genomic technologies (sequencing the SARS-CoV-2 genome) is essential, in the hope that the newly constructed vaccines will, after inevitable modifications, be equally effective against genetic variants of the virus elicited by its expected mutations.

Keywords: infectious diseases - spread, focus of infection, eradication, population growth, migration, epidemic, pandemic

Received: March 2021; Accepted: June 12, 2021; Published: June 12, 2021  Show citation