Grmek M D
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris, France.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 1993;15(3):281-96.
To avoid misinterpretations one should substitute the ambiguous notion of 'new disease' with 'emerging disease'. A disease can be classified emergent in at least five different historical situations; 1) it existed before it could be first identified but was overlooked from a medical point of view because it could not be conceptualized as a nosological entity; 2) it existed but was not noticed until a quantitative and/or qualitative change in its manifestations; 3) it did not exist in a particular region of the world before its introduction from other regions; 4) it never existed in a human population but only in an animal population; 5) it is completely new--the triggering germ and/or necessary environmental conditions did not exist prior to the first clinical manifestations. A series of historical examples illustrate this classification.
为避免误解，人们应该用“新出现的疾病”取代“新疾病”这一模糊概念。一种疾病在至少五种不同的历史情况下可被归类为新出现的疾病：1）它在首次被识别之前就已存在，但从医学角度被忽视，因为它无法被概念化为一种病种实体；2）它已存在，但直到其表现形式发生定量和/或定性变化才被注意到；3）它在从其他地区传入之前，在世界的某个特定地区并不存在；4）它从未在人类群体中存在过，只存在于动物群体中；5）它是全新的——引发病菌和/或必要的环境条件在首次临床表现之前并不存在。一系列历史实例说明了这种分类。
