The French doctor Charles Anglada (1809–1878) wrote a book in 1869 on extinct and new diseases. He did not distinguish infectious diseases from others (he uses the terms reactive and affective diseases, to mean diseases with an external or internal cause, more or less meaning diseases with or without an observable external cause). He writes in the introduction:
Charles Nicolle, laureate of the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine elaborated the concept of emergence of diseases in his 1930 book
Naissance, vie et mort des maladies infectieuses (Birth, Life and Death of Infectious Diseases), and later in
Destin des maladies infectieuses (Fate of Infectious Diseases) published in 1933 which served as lecture notes for his teaching of a second year course at the
Collège de France. In the introduction of the book he sets out the program of the lectures:The term emerging disease has been in use in scientific publications since the beginning of the 1960s at least and is used in the modern sense by
David Sencer in his 1971 article "Emerging Diseases of Man and Animals" where in the first sentence of the introduction he implicitly defines emerging diseases as "infectious diseases of man and animals currently emerging as public health problems" and as a consequence also includes re-emerging diseases:He also notes that some infectious agents are newly considered as diseases because of changing medical technologies:He concludes the introduction with a word of caution:However, to many people in the 1960s and 1970s the emergence of new diseases appeared as a marginal problem, as illustrated by the introduction to the 1962 edition of Natural History of Infectious Disease by
Macfarlane Burnet:as well as the epilogue of the 1972 edition: The concept gained more interest at the end of the 1980s as a reaction to the
AIDS epidemic. On the side of epistemology,
Mirko Grmek worked on the concept of emerging diseases while writing his book on the history of AIDS and later in 1993 published an article about the concept of emerging disease as a more precise notion than the term "new disease" that was mostly used in France at that time to qualify AIDS among others. Also under the shock of the emergence of AIDS, epidemiologists wanted to take a more active approach to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new diseases.
Stephen S. Morse from
The Rockefeller University in New York was chair and principal organizer of the
NIAID/
NIH Conference "Emerging Viruses: The Evolution of Viruses and Viral Diseases" held 1–3 May 1989 in Washington, DC. In the article summarizing the conference the authors write:They further note:In a 1991 paper Morse underlines how the emergence of new infectious diseases (of which the public became aware through the AIDS epidemic) is the opposite of the then generally expected
retreat of these diseases:As a direct consequence of the 1989 conference on emerging viruses, the
Institute Of Medicine convened in February 1991 the 19-member multidisciplinary Committee on Emerging Microbial Threats to Health, co-chaired by
Joshua Lederberg and
Robert Shope, to conduct an 18-month study. According to the report produced by the committee in 1992, its charge "was to identify significant emerging infectious diseases, determine what might be done to deal with them, and recommend how similar future threats might be confronted to lessen their impact on public health." The report recommended setting up a surveillance program to recognize emerging diseases and proposed methods of intervention in case an emergent disease was discovered.The proposed interventions were based on the following: the U.S. public health system, research and training, vaccine and drug development, vector control, public education and behavioral change. A few years after the 1989 Emerging Viruses conference and the 1992 report, the
Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) was formed by a group of scientists as a follow-up in 1994 and the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) launched the
Emerging Infectious Diseases journal in 1995. In April 2000 the WHO organized a meeting on Global Outbreak Alert and Response, which was the founding act of the
Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network. In 2014, the
Western African Ebola virus epidemic demonstrated how ill-prepared the world was to handle such an epidemic. In response, the
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation was launched at the
World Economic Forum in 2017 with the objective of accelerating the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases to be able to offer them to affected populations during outbreaks. CEPI promotes the idea that a proactive approach is required to "create a world in which epidemics are no longer a threat to humanity". ==Classification==