The Emergence of New Diseases

Explain how scientists believe to have eradicated infections and epidemics.

In the middle of the 1970smany thought that death from infectious diseases was the result of poor hygiene and a lack of good antibiotics and vaccines. Problems that by the 1970s had been overcome in most of the industrialized world. Medical practitioners were convinced of, that infectious diseases would only represent a small percentage of their concern. In 1975 a reputable biologist said, that the Western world nearly had eliminated death due to infectious diseases. Smallpox had almost been eradicated, tuberculosis and polio were declining and with the exception of malaria all awful diseases were almost gone. Scientists believed that it was connected with improved hygiene and sanitation, immunizations and antibiotics.

Some sceptics did not believe in the elimination of deadly infectious disease. Find evidence in the text that they were right.

At the time some people were sceptical, and did not believe in the eradication of infectious diseases. Agents of disease were showing resistance to the chemicals that formerly used to kill them. For instance scrapie, an infectious mild disease of sheep, was somehow transmitted to cattle. And to cattle the disease is deadly. Also plants were struck by new diseases as the old ones were eliminated.