Health protection: microbiology and the public health response to the bioterrorism threat.

摘要

Infection is different from other medical and pathology disciplines for the simple reason that it spreads. The challenge is how to protect individuals and the population overall against infection. This has to draw upon the expertise of the infection services that have three main components-clinical infectious diseases, medical microbiology and virology, and the public health (health protection) specialists. Between them they have to ensure that investigations are performed to support clinical care for individual patients with infection and also provide the basis for protection of the health of populations. The public health components include the responsibility of clinical services to provide data for surveillance and to contribute to the investigation of outbreaks, the implementation of control measures when infections are occurring and the introduction of long-term measures to prevent infection in the future. These activities need to cover those infections that we currently recognise as public healthproblems and enable the identification of newly emerging or re-emerging infections.