13
EMERGING INFECTIOUS DISEASES “Microbes and vectors swim in the evolutionary stream and they swim faster than we do. Bacteria reproduce every 30 minutes. For them, a millennium is compressed into a fortnight, they are fleet afoot, and the pace of our research must keep up with them, or they overtake us. Microbes were here on earth 2 billion years before humans arrived, learning every trick for survival, and it is likely that they will be here 2 billion years after we depart."
