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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2025
The fight against the invisible enemy is still very much with us. Many battles have surely been won and countless lives have been saved through scientific progress. Life expectancy globally has gone from 58.6 years a hundred years ago to 79.3 years today. This has been due to a combination of improvements in food supply, provision of clean water, healthier lifestyles and, of course, enormous gains in preventive and curative healthcare, including advances in controlling communicable diseases. However, much still needs to be done, especially in the developing world and in deprived communities.
How far can humankind go in its battle against the unseen enemy of viruses and microbes? The enemy cannot be totally vanquished, and substantial challenges remain. One daunting challenge for contemporary healthcare workers in the third decade of the twenty-first century is the scourge of multi-resistant bacterial infections resulting from overuse or abuse of the antibiotics designed to treat these infections. In battle parlance, the term is ‘friendly fire’. After decades of research, effective vaccines against HIV/AIDS and TB still need to be designed, produced and distributed to where the need is greatest. And humankind remains vulnerable to new infectious diseases introduced from animal sources.
However, coming out of the recent Covid-19 pandemic and looking back at our responses to many other epidemics and communicable disease outbreaks, we can take home several valuable lessons. What is now abundantly clear is that the fight against the unseen enemy must be fought on a considerably broader front than only discovering and producing new and effective antimicrobial drugs and vaccines. The war has to be contested on a more holistic battlefront. Winning will only come if all three contributions to the battle are given equal urgency: (1) the scientific contribution, to provide the necessary advanced resources; (2) the general public's contribution, to support implementation; and (3) the politico-economic contribution, for the necessary material resources.
1. THE SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION
The empirical vaccines of the twentieth century demonstrated spectacular success in eradicating smallpox and eliminating several childhood communicable diseases from large swathes of the planet.
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