Microbes or man, who will win ? (extended summary)

Once the cause of infectious diseases had been uncov- ered, mainly thanks to the work of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur and their followers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, a multivalent strategy was implemented to prevent and control micro- bial infections due to bacteria, viruses or parasites. Thanks to hygiene, the control of insect vectors, vaccina- tion and the wide use of antibiotics, the most dangerous and widespread infectious diseases could be more or less controlled, at least in developed countries. Hence the impression, in the 1970s, that the fight against infectious diseases had been won. This was a major mistake. Beginning at the end of the 1970s, several new infectious diseases have emerged, some of them, like AIDS, taking hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives every year. In this presentation, on a few examples, we analyze the causes of this emer- gence and then review the new actions that are or could be taken to control infectious diseases.