Development of Therapeutic Interventions for Emerging Diseases

New infectious diseases emerge with a high regularity; it has recently been estimated that a novel infectious disease agent either emerges or re-emerges approximately every 8 months. This latter statistic is supported by the observation that there have been over 335 emerging infectious disease (EID) events between 1940 and 2004 (Jones et al., 2008). Of course, not all of these EID events represent a threat to human health, indeed many of these are infections of animals, although approximately 60% are also zoonotic infections (which by definition can be transmitted between animals and humans); another additional proportion also have the potential to cross the species barrier. Since 1970 there have been approximately 30 new species of pathogen emerge which cause human infection. Table 1 lists these pathogens (taken from World Health Organisation, 1999).