HIV/AIDS News

On the second day of the 2006 Mid-Atlantic Bio conference, Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), delivered a fascinating speech on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. He kicked off his talk with a quote from physician and anthropologist T. Aidan Cockburn. “We can look forward with confidence to a considerable degree of freedom from infectious diseases at a time not too far in the future. Indeed…it seems reasonable to anticipate that within some measurable time…all the major infections will have disappeared.”

Cockburn predicted the eventual eradication of infectious disease in 1963, just as Dr. Fauci was embarking on a career in the field. But fortunately for Fauci, Cockburn’s prediction couldn’t have been farther from the truth. What Cockburn didn’t take into account was that infectious disease never really abated in other countries and that disease would evolve in the U.S. In recent years we’ve seen the emergence and re-emergence of some of the most serious infectious diseases the world has ever know, including HIV/AIDS, bird flu, SARS, West Nile virus, malaria, and, most recently, extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis. These diseases have challenged scientists and health workers alike, but they’ve also opened up new opportunities for the healthcare industry to develop new methods of dealing with infectious disease.