Preventing Emerging Infectious Diseases: A Strategy for the 21st Century

Societal, technological, and environmental factors continue to have a dramatic
effect on infectious diseases worldwide, facilitating the emergence of new
diseases and the reemergence of old ones, sometimes in drug-resistant forms.
Modern demographic and ecologic conditions that favor the spread of infectious
diseases include rapid population growth; increasing poverty and urban migration; more frequent movement across international boundaries by tourists, workers, immigrants, and refugees; alterations in the habitats of animals and arthropods that transmit disease; increasing numbers of persons with impaired host defenses; and changes in the way that food is processed and distributed.

Several recent health events underscore the need for a public health system
ready to address whatever disease problems that might arise. For example, in 1997, an avian strain of influenza that had never before infected humans began to kill previously healthy persons in Hong Kong, and strains of Staphylococcus aureus with diminished susceptibility to the antibiotic vancomycin were reported in Japan and the United States. In addition, researchers recently discovered that a strain of the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) had been infecting humans for at least 20 years before AIDS emerged as a worldwide epidemic.

Preventing Emerging Infectious Diseases: A Strategy for the 21st Century
describes CDC’s plan to combat today’s infectious diseases and prevent those of tomorrow.