In crowded conditions with limited access to health care and poor sanitation, pathogens like Ebola, Zika and influenza enjoy lush opportunities to spread. Across the globe, people are abandoning the countryside for life in the city, leading to rapid, unplanned urban expansions. Three fundamental, interrelated factors fuel the microbial comeback, experts say. Millions would have to be vaccinated to keep the infection from establishing a foothold. In 2015, the WHO had declared Nigeria, one of the three last countries in the world that suffered the infection, free of wild polio. The international community’s decades-long effort to end the transmission of polio had unraveled. CDC Global/flickr (CC BY 2.0)īut even as UN delegates arrived for their meeting in New York City in September, another dreaded infection was making headlines again. Volunteers have immunized nearly 3 billion children around the globe in the last two decades. This year, Nigeria reported the first cases of wild polio since July 2014. It’s “huge,” says University of Toronto epidemiologist David Fisman. It was only the fourth time over its 70-plus-year history that the assembly had been compelled to consider a health challenge. Its arrival presaged yet another unprecedented event: the convening of the United Nations General Assembly to consider the global problem of antibiotic-resistant bugs. The gene allows bacteria to resist the last-ditch antibiotic colistin, bringing us one step closer to a looming era of untreatable infections that would transform the practice of medicine. A few months later, scientists reported the just-discovered “superbug” mcr-1 gene in microbes collected from humans and pigs in the United States ( SN Online: 5/27/16). What would balloon into the largest outbreak of yellow fever in Angola in 30 years had just begun. Just as the unprecedented outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was collapsing in early 2016, the World Health Organization declared Zika virus, newly erupted in the Americas, an international public health emergency. Over the course of 2016, their exploits reached a crescendo. In the past several decades, over 300 infectious pathogens have either newly emerged or emerged in new places, causing a steady drumbeat of outbreaks and global pandemic scares.
“To write about infectious disease,” he wrote in 1962, “is almost to write of something that has passed into history.” It was barely more than half a century ago that the Nobel Prize–winning virologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet mused about the demise of contagions.
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