The focus in medical news over the past few decades has been the rising trends of “lifestyle” related diseases – high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes mellitus and a panoply of cancers. These diseases have become the focus for both healthcare prac-titioners and society in general as our population appeared to have limited the threat of infectious diseases through a combination of robust public health measures and a well-managed national vaccination programme. Other than HIV infections, dangerous and debilitating infectious diseases appeared to be problems of poor societies in Third World countries.

The emergence of SARS in 2003 has provided a stark reminder to all of us that infectious diseases and epidemics will continue to pose a serious danger around the world. The microbes that cause these diseases continue to find new ways of adapting to their hosts as well as finding new hosts. Many “new” diseases are really old diseases that have found their way into human society as we continue to alter the environment around us. Many of these “new” illnesses have arisen from viruses that have “jumped” species as we increasingly encroach on the forests and wooded areas that harbour them. Disease such as Ebola, HIV and a variety of haemorrhagic fevers are good examples of viruses that have “jumped” species.

The changing shape of the agricultural industry has also brought with it a different set of problems as “highly efficient” farms for breeding animals for the market provide a fertile ground for infectious agents to spread quickly in an immunologically naïve and often genetically similar population. This has become very apparent through our current experience of the Avian Influenza that is sweeping through East Asia .

The rapid rise of large urban centres and quick, easy and affordable travel has also meant that diseases that would previously have been limited to small geographical areas can now rapidly spread to all corners of the world. This allows new infectious agents to spread rapidly to a whole host of susceptible hosts and often in a society that is ill-equipped to handle large numbers of infectious cases.

This supplement on Singapore’s experience seeks to capture some of the issues and thinking behind Singapore and the SAF’s response to SARS in 2003. It is hoped that the combination of observations and lessons learnt will provide a reference point for future health care planners to develop a robust response capability for dealing with such threats to our health in future.

BG(DR) Wong Yue Sie
Chief of SAF Medical Corps