PREVENTING THE spread of infectious diseases is not just the responsibility of governments and public health teams; individuals also have an important role to play, a conference of infectious disease specialists has been told.
Dr Nina Marano of the US Centers for Disease Control said people should consider not getting on aeroplanes if they have a fever and they should make sure they do basic things like washing their hands regularly while travelling. “It goes from the individual personal responsibility all the way on up to governments; it’s not just governments alone that can solve the problem,” she said.
She was speaking at an international meeting on emerging diseases and surveillance in Vienna, organised by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.
Dr Marano also stressed that parents had a key role to play in teaching children, for example, not to kiss a pet on the face, an act which could result in an infection being passed on. “Children need a lot of supervision around pets,” she said. Last year in the UK a three-month-old baby got salmonella from the family’s pet snake.
Dr Marano also urged people to be more prudent in their use of antibiotics, describing the global problem of antibiotic resistance as “an emerging disease” in itself. She said extensive drug-resistant TB, for example, was now “essentially resistant to every drug that can be used to treat it” and it was moving around the world as people moved.
“We have to make very careful choices about the kind of antibiotics that we use in people and in animals so that the precious antibiotics can be saved for when they’re really needed,” she said. “Again it comes back to personal responsibility. The first thing that you do is take only medicines that are prescribed for you by your doctor. You take them for the full course and you don’t give them to your friends,” she stressed.
She said sore throats and colds were viral infections that did not need an antibiotic (antibiotics are effective against bacterial infections). “That’s a hard message to get across to a mother who wants a pill to give to the baby so the baby will feel better.”
Meanwhile, delegates also heard concern about the way that the public generally tends to get overly excited about new bugs which kill relatively few people and ignore more common ones which are likely to cause far more fatalities. As a result, more money is spent on the “scary” ones at the expense of spending on those which would save more lives.
Prof Howard Markel, a paediatric infectious diseases consultant and professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, said: “Our fascination with the suddenly appearing microbe that kills relatively few in spectacular fashion often trumps our response to infectious scourges that patiently kill millions every year,” he said.
He cited the fascination with anthrax in 2001 and Sars in 2003. Sars killed about 800 people but measles killed about 400,000 children worldwide last year. It was these kinds of common infection rather than bird flu which kept him up at night, he said.
Prof Timothy Brewer, director of global health programmes for McGill University Medical School in Canada, said influenza was now the biggest emerging disease threat and was causing up to 40,000 excess deaths in the US every year and about 8,000 in Canada.