Infectious Diseases

Fundamentally, doctors are blind without diagnostic tools. “It’s like looking for someone in a cave without any light,” says Dr. Mark Miller, Chief Medical Officer at bioMérieux. “You have no idea where you are.” 

World Health Day, observed April 7^th, is a global initiative sponsored by the WHO that intends to bring awareness  to health concerns. This year’s theme, Our Planet, our health, highlights how environmental factors and most importantly, the climate crisis, impact human health—including the spread of infectious diseases.

In low- and middle-income countries, 11% of patients who undergo surgery are infected in the process. With antimicrobial resistance on the rise, many infections are becoming more and more difficult to treat. 

“The Covid-19 pandemic has had devastating effects on every aspect of global health, but tuberculosis services have been disproportionately affected,” says WHO Chief Scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan in a recent New England Journal of Medicine article.

In the midst of the fight against COVID-19, it’s important to acknowledge the many other diseases competing with the coronavirus for the time and resources of our healthcare facilities.

In the last two years, the world has learned about PCR not only through the media but also through the shared experience of being swabbed and tested for COVID-19. But do you understand how these tests work?

The immune system seems simple in the way we experience it. The real story is extremely complex, and researchers are continuing to study and expand our knowledge of the immune system.

Microbes have existed for billions of years, but human beings have only begun to discover and describe them in the last few hundred years.