Surgeon General of the United States

of America, William Stewart, said in 1967: “The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases. We have basically wiped out infection in the United States. ” This influential com-ment has, however, been contradicted by subsequent events. For example, Jones et al. recently reported that from 1940 to 2004 several hundred new infectious diseases emerged, many of which are zoonotic and bacterial.1 More than half of these new diseases have emerged since the 1970s, with the 1980s being the decade with the most new infections. Clearly, infectious diseases are still an open book. Humans and pathogens share a long co-evolution, and infections have exerted a remarkable influence on the course of historical events and human societies. This has been abundantly well documented by historians. Yet somehow, infectious diseases have not attracted a great deal of attention from bioethicists. This volume of essays is a wel-come attempt to remedy that deficit. It stems from a thematic issue of the journal Bioethics devoted to ethics and infectious disease, published in 2005. A point of departure for the book is the so-called 10:90 divide, whereby less than 10 % of medical research is devoted to diseases that account for more than 90 % of the global burden of disease. Driving this agenda is a concern for the most disadvantaged populations, which are disproportion-ately affected by infectious diseases. Selgelid, in the introductory es-say, points out that a review of the bio-ethics literature demonstrates a paucity of serious ethical reflection on infec-tious diseases. He elucidates several reasons for this neglect. First, he argue