Grave New World

When Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet sat down 17 years ago to write Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease, there was an abundance of knowledge about the nature of most of mankind's ills, but a dearth of specific remedies. Now, thanks to the sulfas and antibiotics, the picture is so different that Burnet, rewriting his book completely as The Natural History of Infectious Disease (Cambridge University Press; $4.50) can make the revolutionary statement: "It is not too much to say that at the present time no acute infection occurring in a previously healthy individual will result in his death if he reaches a well-equipped hospital before irreparable damage has been done to his tissues." (The only common exceptions: yellow fever and smallpox, which vaccines can prevent.)

But it would be a grave error, the Australian researcher warns, to believe that because man has some fancy new drugs the bugs will lie down and take it. Not only disease-causing germs but diseases themselves are constantly evolving. So, says Burnet, while it is right and necessary to give antibiotics to protect a patient for a short time against a specific hazard, they must not be used indiscriminately or indefinitely. Reason: it is impossible to be sure that the germs cannot develop resistance to the drug, and if they do, they may become the dominant forms of their type, much harder to combat than the usual unselected strains.

"We are moving into a new world," says Burnet, who did much to open a new world of virus research (TIME, Dec. 8), "and we must be always alert to look beyond the immediate effect of some new procedure to see what the logical outcome of its large-scale use will be. Antibacterial drugs, like measures to prevent the spread of infection or immunization procedures, are potent weapons, but to the biologist they are merely new factors . . . [among] which the microorganisms of infection must struggle to survive. We must never underestimate the potentialities of our enemies."

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