[Current aspects of infectious diseases in industrialized countries: development or history?]. / L'actualité des maladies infectieuses dans les pays industrialisés: évolution ou histoire?

ABSTRACT

Man's conception of nature is a historically dated phenomenon. Thus the recent development of infectious diseases in industrialized countries could either be a real phenomenon or simply an artifact related to our current conception of medical progress and research. Is the return of infectious disease a natural process or has modern civilization been less prudent than its predecessors? What are the characteristic features of modern pathogenesis? Are these "changes" the result of some natural dynamics or an evolution in our means of investigation? Modern civilization has not invented technological deviation or diseases of civilization, phenomena well know in the past, but what is new is the fact that science today, with an ever growing amount of information on molecular epidemiology, is still raising questions about infection, recognized new unsuspected forms of the living world which do not fit into our well-knitted outline of infectious agents. We have applied our simplistic and mechanistic schemas designed for the timespan of human life to the evolutionary processes. The effects of evolution and history are thus combined today in a novel way composing a new future for infectious diseases. This new way of looking at infectious diseases is not totally natural nor totally historical. It is perhaps an epistemological revolution going on within epidemiology. The return of infections disease would appear to have a direct effect on magnifying the knowledge and the delinquency of our culture.