Infectious diseases are a perpetual challenge — Fauci
The worldwide Covid-19 crisis shows that infectious diseases present a “perpetual challenge” and officials have to be better prepared for them, outgoing US presidential adviser Anthony Fauci said in an opinion article.
While a rich and varied supply of treatments once lulled doctors into believing that infectious diseases no longer presented a threat, outbreaks from HIV/Aids to Covid-19 have reversed that thinking, Fauci said in an essay published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“It’s never over because we will continually be beset with new, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases similar to what we’re experiencing right now with Covid,” he said in an interview.
Fauci will step down as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the end of the year.
Covid-19 is just the latest outbreak Fauci has responded to in his 54 years at the National Institutes of Health: others include SARS, West Nile virus, swine flu, infectious hepatitis, Zika virus and Ebola virus. He has said that one of his greatest disappointments as head of NIAID was the failure to devise an effective vaccine against HIV, which continues to kill about half-a-million people worldwide yearly.
Society tends to give less attention to unknown or rare threats, no matter how severe they may be, which is why the world has not been well prepared for pandemics, Fauci said.
“I guess it’s human nature that you focus on what the immediate threat that you can see as opposed to the threat that might occur that you don’t see yet,” he said in the interview.
Fauci said he would advise his successor to follow the science and stay away from the politics. “We’re living in a very unusual situation that’s somewhat slanted toward antiscience and a lot of politicisation,” he said.