The notion of “emerging infectious diseases” (EID) as a category of global health concerns was created in the 1990s to acknowledge that, although public health interventions, vaccines, and antibiotics since the late 19th century had given wealthier parts of the world control over most infectious diseases, the experience of Ebola and HIV/AIDS showed that new human diseases could still arise. “Emerging diseases” have clear histories, and the task the field of EID set itself has been to make those histories as short as possible—to catch emerging diseases as close to their origin as possible and snuff them out before they can become pandemics. In contrast, many of the known infectious diseases, those that were allegedly “conquered” by the rise of biomedicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and which (aside from smallpox) nonetheless still persist today, were assumed to have existed “since time immemorial.” Their histories had no specific time-depth, no documentable origins, and few discernible narrative arcs. The advent of a new field of research, palaeogenetics, has made possible an evolutionary perspective on pathogenic microorganisms, bringing hitherto unimaginable specificity to their documentable histories. Many origin stories, and nearly all globalization stories, fall within periods that historians and archaeologists study intensively. I argue that the diseases that have proved best suited to global expansion since the advent of the Holocene—those that became pandemics, like COVID-19—are those that have best exploited humans' global networks and behaviors in a given age. This recognition, in turn, gives the fields of both global health and history of medicine a new agenda.

中文翻译：

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新出现的疾病，重新出现的历史

“新发传染病” (EID) 作为全球健康问题的一个类别的概念是在 1990 年代创建的，目的是承认尽管自 19 世纪后期以来公共卫生干预措施、疫苗和抗生素已经让世界上较富裕的地区控制了大多数传染病，埃博拉和艾滋病毒/艾滋病的经验表明，新的人类疾病仍有可能出现。“新发疾病”有明确的历史，而 EID 领域本身设定的任务是尽可能缩短这些历史——尽可能接近其起源地捕捉新出现的疾病，并在它们成为大流行之前将其消灭。相比之下，许多已知的传染病，那些据称在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初被生物医学的兴起“征服”并且（除了天花）今天仍然存在的那些，被认为“自古以来”就存在。他们的历史没有特定的时间深度，没有可记录的起源，也没有明显的叙事弧线。古遗传学这一新研究领域的出现使得对病原微生物的进化观点成为可能，为其可记录的历史带来了迄今为止难以想象的特异性。许多起源故事，以及几乎所有的全球化故事，都属于历史学家和考古学家深入研究的时期。我认为，自全新世出现以来最适合全球扩张的疾病——那些成为流行病的疾病，像 COVID-19 一样——是那些在特定年龄最充分利用人类全球网络和行为的人。反过来，这种认识为全球健康和医学史领域提供了新的议程。