今日の洋書

• McNeill, WH, "Plagues and Peoples"

The climate of medical opinion has changed considerably since this book came out, for in 1976 many doctors believed that infectious diseases had lost their power to affect human lives seriously. Scientific medicine, they supposed, had finally won decisive victory over disease germs. Newly discovered antibiotics and relatively simple prophylactic and public health measures had at last made infections easy to prevent and cure. The World Health Organization actually succeded in eliminating smallpox from the face of the earth in the same year this book was published, and optimists believed that other infections, like measles, might go the same way if sufficient medical effort were put into worldwide campaigns to isolate and cure each and every infection.

• • 確かに，そういう 'climate' でしたね．ところが．．．

Development of resistant strains of malaria, TB, and other familiar infections was a second, and in many ways more important, sign that twentieth-century victories over the parasitic microorganisms that feed upon our bodies was only an unusually dramatic and drastic disturbance of the age-old balance between human hosts and disease organisms. As the century comes to its close, it seems sure that infections are comming back, regaining some of thier old importance for human life; and medical men have begun to recognize how their increasingly powerful interventions had the unexpected effect of accelerating the biological evolution of disease germs, making them impervious to one after another form of chemical attack.