[EWS2-5] The Future of Infectious Diseases
Our interest in research in infectious disease is to understand natural history of infectious diseases over both time and space, through the appreciation to interaction between infectious agents and hosts, or human being in this case, as well as environment. Agents and hosts are creatures in nature, have its own strategy to survive, affect each other, and evolve in the surrounding environments. Take human microbiome as one example, the existence of the microbiome raises some fundamental questions for us. First, who am I to live while interacting with such a vast number of bacteria? It could be something that makes us suspect the existence of "disease by absence." Since Pasteur and Koch, to treat disease by "discovering and eliminating disease-causing pathogens" has been the dogma of modern microbiology until now. This could suggest that there is another medicine that is different from the premise that has been the dogma of modern microbiology. Moreover, such it may exist only in the paradox that the significance of such "disease of absence" can only be understood when the microorganisms that cause it are absent. In both micro and macro ecosystems, the new measures against infectious diseases need to be built around the concept of "symbiosis".