About the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology

Epidemiology is a very interdisciplinary science making use of a wide variety of approaches and technologies. It is this interdisciplinary character that stimulated the foundation of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology (DIDE) within the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College.

The benefit of an interdisciplinary Department, therefore, is to place groups of scientists with different but complementary knowledge and skills in close proximity within an environment designed to promote interaction and collaboration.

Today, the conquest of infection and associated disease remains a challenge to the medical profession and the scientific community. Recent scientific advances in a wide variety of fields such as molecular biology, immunology, human and pathogen genetics, plus the computational sciences (bioinformatics), have raised hopes that rapid progress may now occur in the search for new chemotherapeutic agents and new vaccines to treat and prevent infection. These new technologies present many exciting opportunities for furthering our understanding of the epidemiology and control of infectious agents.

Infectious and associated diseases

Infectious diseases remained the leading cause of premature mortality in human communities throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st, due largely to their impact in the growing, and increasingly urbanised societies in developing countries. In industrialized countries during the 1960s and 1970s the increasing availability of drugs and vaccines to combat and prevent infection led many to believe that the threat from infectious disease was all but over. Their continued spread and impact in the poor regions of the world was viewed more as a problem of finance and resource distribution which could be solved by international aid to improve primary health care in the developing world.

In the past two decades, however, a series of events have shaken our belief in the conquest of infection and associated disease. These include the emergence and rapid spread worldwide of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV-1), the evolution, spread and persistence of drug resistant strains of viruses, bacteria, protozoa and helminths and the many difficulties encountered in the eradication of common childhood infections by mass vaccination and in the development of vaccines to protect against the genetically variable pathogen populations such as the aetiological agents of AIDS, malaria and gonorrhoea. The problems so apparent in human communities are very much mirrored by those in the agricultural industry where infectious disease remains a threat to the health and welfare of livestock worldwide. The development of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic in the cattle population of Great Britain plus its spread to other European countries and the associated threat to human health reminds us of our continued vulnerability to new and re-emerging infectious agents. In Great Britain the recent epidemic of Foot and Mouth Disease is also a stark reminder of our vulnerability to infectious agents, when movement of livestock and contaminated food materials is so frequent within and between countries.