A small world, indeed!

Sometime back, I read an article in TOI in their science section. The article was a little snippet on something called "monkey malaria," some new strain of malaria that, as the name suggests, was present in a particular species of monkeys and which has now been discovered to infect humans. Reading the article got me thinking about a couple of things.

Firstly, what's with the sudden spate of "animal-illnesses"? From bird flu to swine flu to now monkey malaria?!? Maybe, the world is no longer big enough for all of us. Maybe, co-habitation is utopian. Or, maybe people have just lost their minds. At any rate, this spate is rather amusing (as long as it isn't declared an epidemic)!

Secondly, for as long as I can remember, I've been socialised to believe that the field of medicine has advanced and this development is a good thing. Mortality rates are lower, diseases that were feared earlier (because they had no cure) are now curable and on the whole life expectancy has increased. But when I was reading this article, I wondered... Does development ever really happen? On the one hand, we've found ways to ward off illnesses and on the other we're faced with newer and newer ones. Maybe, our current developed society is not very different from that of our ancestors. Maybe, diseases also come in "ages". So like there was the Stone Age, Ice Age, Bronze Age etc., there is also a Small-Pox Age, Leprosy Age, Malaria Age and now, an "Animal-Illness" age!