Humans developed antibiotics to combat bacterial diseases, but the widespread use of antibiotics has caused the emergence of resistant strains of bacteria. A face lift for bacteria
"Life always finds a way," says Chen Chien-jen, director of the National Science Council's Division of Life Sciences-bacteria can easily adapt to new environments.
"Microorganisms are not going to die out, so infectious diseases can never be completely eradicated either," says Shiao Men-fang. He says that the simpler an organism is, the greater its ability to adapt to its environment, for example by developing drug resistance.
For instance, a major new mutation of the influenza virus appears about once every ten years. These bypass the resistance people have to previous strains, leading to major new epidemics.
Ironically, although modern medicine is able to cure many infectious diseases, medical interventions may also assist the spread of infectious pathogens.
Chen Chien-jen describes hospitals as distribution centers for bacteria and viruses: The bacteria found in hospitals are more virulent than those found in the community at large, because hospital patients include many who have to undergo lengthy treatment, so that bacteria have greater opportunities to congregate and to exchange drug resistance genes. With the trend towards the concentration of medical treatment in hospitals, rates of in-hospital infection have risen greatly.
Lien Te-cheng, an attending physician in the Department of Respiratory Therapy at Taipei's Veterans General Hospital, suggests that it is best if in-patients are discharged as soon as they are 70% recovered, because somebody just recovering from a major illness is much more vulnerable to any secondary infection which they might contract in hospital.
Other factors, such as the immunosuppressive drugs used to prevent rejection after organ transplants, produce an "immune deficiency syndrome" in patients, which also reduces their resistance to infectious disease. Many such effects of medical treatment make infectious diseases more difficult to combat.
As well as the side effects of medical technology, fears have recently been raised overseas that the alteration of microorganisms by genetic engineering may lead to new diseases.Nobody's fault but our own
The upsurge in bacterial and viral diseases is also related to changes in the environment and ecology. The effects on infectious diseases of recent climatic and environmental changes have become a new topic for epidemiological research.
Chen Chien-jen says that both long-term global climate change and the short-term El Nino effect are leading to an expansion in the geographical range of many infectious diseases.
Professor Hsu Huang-hsiung of NTU's Department of Atmospheric Sciences says that over the last century, average global temperatures have risen by 0.6蚓, and many experts predict that in the 21st century this figure will exceed 1蚓, and could even reach as much as 4-5蚓.
Epidemiologists suspect that global warming will allow arthropod-borne diseases such as dengue fever, yellow fever and malaria to spread from the tropics into temperate regions where they did not previously occur.
Teng Hwa-jen of the National Institute of Preventive Medicine's medical entomology section says that dengue fever used to occur only sporadically in Taiwan, but the trend in recent years seems to be for it to become a cyclical endemic disease.
Dengue fever was formerly seen only in southern Taiwan, but since 1995 there have also been outbreaks in Taipei County and Taipei City. Yang Yan-shih, a senior specialist at the DOH's Bureau of Communicable Disease Control, says that monitoring of dengue fever has now been extended from areas south of the Choshui River to cover the whole of Taiwan.
Scrub typhus, caused by a rickettsia carried by chiggers, has also spread from the outlying islands and southern mountain areas, and may now occur throughout Taiwan. Teng Hwa-jen says that this year there has been a large increase in the number of cases, with over 150 so far.
Chen Chien-jen says the spread of diseases from south to north may indeed be associated with the past two successive warm winters and this summer's consistently high temperatures.Urbanization of rural viruses?
Although investigation of the relationship between climate and infectious diseases is still at a preliminary stage, excessive human development of jungles and rainforests has increased people's chances of coming into contact with the microorganisms which live there, and with their natural hosts. Although it may not be obvious to most people, there can be no doubt that this has increased the chances of diseases spreading.
For example, it is the development of forest areas which has enabled dengue fever, which originated in the jungle, to evolve into an "urban virus."
Chen Hao-yung of the NIPM says that once a virus develops into an urban virus it becomes very hard to eradicate. Viruses are very simple in structure, and as long as they have live cells to act as their hosts they can continue to reproduce. Hence cities, which have dense human populations and also harbor large numbers of rodents and other pests, are perfect breeding grounds for viruses.
Furthermore, human activities such as forest development and the construction of dams change the ecology of pathogens and their vectors. Schistosomiasis in Egypt is an excellent example. Chen Chien-jen explains that schistosomiasis, which is caused by "blood flukes"-tiny parasitic flatworms-which use water snails as intermediate hosts, was once transmitted to humans in the Nile Valley only when the Nile was in flood. But since dams and barrages were built on the river's upper reaches, the water flows all year round in irrigation schemes, and the snails thrive year-round too. Thus humans are now at risk of infection from the schistosoma parasite at any time of the year.Migrant mosquitoes, displaced dogs
Diseases which occur in countries overseas may seem far away, but now that the world has become a "global village," no nation can isolate itself from the risk of infectious bacteria and viruses.
Population growth, population movements and increasing international travel and trade have all accelerated the spread of infectious diseases. The "airport malaria" which has appeared in Western Europe in recent years is a typical example.
Shiao Men-fang explains that with frequent air connections between Africa and major European cities such as London, Paris and Frankfurt, a few Anopheles gambiae malarial mosquitoes often "hitch rides" on Boeing 747s and other large aircraft, and this leads to malaria being transmitted to people living in the vicinity of the European airports.
Fortunately, the climate in Western Europe is not suitable for the mosquitoes to breed, so they only cause a few infections near airports, not major epidemics. But disease control specialists fear that as global warming leads to longer summers and higher temperatures, the mosquitoes may one day successfully "migrate" and establish themselves permanently in Europe, at which point malaria could become endemic there.
A case of malaria transmission which occurred at Taipei's Veterans General Hospital (VGH) in 1995 shocked the public. A local resident who suffered chills and fevers after returning from Algeria had finally gone to VGH after other doctors had been unable to determine the cause. The doctors at VGH also failed to diagnose malaria, but sent the patient for a PET brain scan. A tube in the system used to inject the radioactive tracer compound became contaminated with the malaria parasite, and because it was used for subsequent patients, it led to seven people being infected with malaria.
If disease-carrying mosquitoes can move from country to country, rabid dogs may also become illegal immigrants. With recent close contacts-and frequent smuggling-across the Taiwan Strait, people have begun to worry that rabies, which has not been seen in Taiwan for 40 years, may also be "smuggled" onto the island.
In Shiao Men-fang's view, this is no idle fear. He says that rabies is endemic in mainland China, and anyone who brings in a dog from there may also bring in rabies.Self reliance beats drug reliance
Urbanization and lifestyle changes have already made many infectious diseases "unstoppable." This is particularly true of airborne diseases of the respiratory tract.
"We can improve management of drinking water, eradicate disease vectors and promote good hygiene, but we can't isolate ourselves from social interaction," says Wu Tsung-neng.
Most experts take the view that in densely populated Taiwan, the diseases most likely to cause large epidemics, and those most difficult to prevent, are still the common respiratory tract infections such as tuberculosis and influenza.
Influenza is an acute disease of the respiratory tract. Four global epidemics over the last century have caused many deaths from complications among people with weak immunity, such as old people and young children. For example, the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic claimed 20 million lives around the world.
The human race has never had an answer to influenza, and similarly many people find it difficult to understand why the medical world is unable to find effective treatments against enteroviruses. In fact, unlike bacterial diseases, apart from herpes virus there are no drugs available to treat most viral infections, and doctors can only provide supportive treatments. In other words, to defeat viruses we have to rely on the body's own defense mechanisms.
This has caused many people to wonder whether the fact that 50 children were killed by an enterovirus which most people take in their stride is a sign that the immune systems of children today are growing ever weaker.
"Quite the opposite," says Dr. Huang Li-min, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at National Taiwan University Hospital's Department of Pediatrics. He says that in fact, children's immune systems have been growing ever stronger. He cites the example of rotaviruses, for which there are no drug treatments available, so that recovery depends entirely on the body's own defenses. Huang says that in recent years better nutrition has strengthened the immune systems of Taiwanese children, and nowadays one very rarely hears of people dying of rotavirus infections. But in third-world regions such as Africa and India, such infections claim millions of lives every year.Fight fire with fire?
But in the case of enteroviruses, the opposite seems to be true. None of the regions where enterovirus disease occurs are so-called backward regions-they are areas such as the USA, Taiwan and Malaysia where hygiene is considered to be relatively good. In fact, some experts feel that since most enterovirus cases in Taiwan are in rural areas, it is still the result of poor hygiene. Nonetheless, it is also true that children today live too cleanly: they lack natural sources of infection in their environment, so that when they do meet with a virus they are quite unable to fend it off.
Cleanliness is a goal pursued avidly by modern people. The market offers a panoply of personal hygiene products: shampoos, face washing emulsions, mouthwashes, shower gels. . . . From head to foot, nothing is left uncleansed. And then there are the washing up liquids, washing powders, floor cleansers, kitchen cleaners, bathroom cleaners and the like. People are terrified of leaving a spot of dirt or a trace of bacteria around them.
"It's not necessarily the case that the cleaner people are, the healthier they are," says Chen Hao-yung: without bacteria, humans cannot survive, so on no account should we try to wipe them all out. For instance, gargling with an antiseptic mouthwash is quite unnecessary, and showering several times a day would destroy the natural "barrier" which protects our bodies from microbes, thus achieving exactly the opposite of what was desired.
Physicians regard polio as a disease which arises from excessive cleanliness. In many traditional societies, most children contract mild infections of the polio virus as babies, and develop immunity to it; but if they are isolated from it by hygiene measures and do not first come into contact with it until they are a little older, it can cause severe paralysis or even death.
There is no shortage of examples in Taiwan of improved conditions bringing the risk of disease. Huang Li-min says that improvements in public hygiene have reduced rates of natural infection of hepatitis A, and some 90% of people under 30 in Taiwan now have no antibodies to the virus. But Taiwan is densely populated and hygiene here is still far from perfect. This creates the potential conditions for major epidemics of hepatitis A. Hence in the future everyone without antibodies may need to be vaccinated.Too high a price
Although natural infection is one method of "immunization," it has a downside. To take this year's enterovirus outbreak as an example, NQS director general Wu Tsung-neng estimates on the basis of reports from 800 physicians at selected locations throughout Taiwan that some 450,000 people were infected. The majority of people now have antibodies to the virus, so it will not cause another major epidemic in the next few years. But this natural immunization cost over 50 lives.
As economic conditions and the quality of life have improved, people today naturally value life far more highly than in former times. For instance, although chickenpox usually produces only mild symptoms, it is potentially crippling or even fatal. Old people still believe that the earlier a child gets chickenpox the better, but despite the high price of the chickenpox vaccine now imported from America, many parents are willing to have their children immunized.
Huang Li-min observes that improving people's living conditions and carrying out vaccination programs are effective ways of reducing people's risk of contracting infectious diseases. The problem is that "many economically backward regions are not able to buy vaccines or improve living conditions, so that improvements cannot be carried out simultaneously in countries around the world."
For the whole global village to be improved into an enormous "aseptic chamber" is surely impossible, but what we can predict is that if humans do not change their attitudes towards the environment and nature, and if they continue to pay scant regard to safe practice in medical treatment and the use of drugs, new viruses and infectious diseases will never stop appearing.