Determinants of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases

In the 1960s and 1970s, many public health experts assumed that infectious diseases could at long last be conquered as had occurred with smallpox. In the last two decades, reports warned that infectious diseases were clearly not a problem of the past. They could not be considered as a unique or isol ated event of wild and faraway regions, but penetrated every corner of the globe. Emerging infectious diseases have been recently described as clinically dis tinct conditions whose incidence in humans has increased regionally or worl dwide within the past two decades. Emergence may be due to the introduction of new agents to or the recognition of an existing disease that has gone u ndetected, and re-emergence may describe the re-appearance of known disease s after a decline in incidence. In this article a global, multidisciplinary and integrated approach in different fields of demography, epidemiology, e conomy, ecology, anthropology and environment at science has been considere d to describe the different determinants responsible for the emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases.