Welcome from the Scientific Director

Dear Friends It is a pleasure for me to welcome you to this virtual headquarters of the CIBER thematic area of Infectious Diseases (CIBERINFEC). Thank you very much for your visit. We hope you like it and find it useful.

Infectious diseases (ID) have had an enormous impact on the health of human beings throughout history, generating billions of deaths, great morbidity and even conditioning some of the historical processes that have shaped the current moment. Some of humanity's great health advances have also been related to IDs: the introduction of antimicrobials in clinical practice, the generalization of vaccination campaigns, and improvements in asepsis and antisepsis have reduced the impact of infections in society. However, infectious diseases continue to be one of the main threats worldwide: everyone suffers from an infection throughout their lives; infections such as tuberculosis, AIDS, malaria, among many others, generate large epidemics; the increase in antimicrobial resistance makes it difficult to treat infections that not so long ago were easily cured; and the appearance of variants of known microorganisms makes it possible for some vaccine-preventable infections to re-emerge. Infectious diseases have the peculiarity that they are produced by microorganisms, by beings capable of reproducing, adapting to the environment and evolving, and sometimes they are capable of doing so much faster than what we "superior" living beings do, which gives them a characteristic of unpredictability for which we must be prepared. The COVID-19 pandemic is a clear example, as well as a harsh reminder, of all this.

CIBERINFEC is a collaborative research center of excellence that brings together more than 500 scientists belonging to 46 research groups distributed throughout the Spanish geography. At CIBERINFEC we work together with professionals from the health, academic, public administration and research center fields in order to promote research and provide up-to-date information on infectious diseases, with the ultimate goal of improving people's individual health and the general health status of society.

We are organized into four scientific Programs that address the main health problems related to infectious diseases, such as Global health, emerging and re-emerging infections (Program 1), Antimicrobial resistance (Program 2), HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (Program 3), and Infections in non-HIV immunocompromised patients and healthcare-associated infections (Program 4).

At CIBERINFEC we want to contribute as much as possible to improving people's quality of life, through cooperative research of excellence and practice, which helps to prevent, reduce the impact and cure infectious diseases. And this is only possible with a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach that promotes personalized and precision medicine, as well as the integration of new technologies. In this context, transversality becomes a key element, and collaboration with other thematic areas of CIBER, with which CIBERINFEC has many obvious points in common, but also with other public and private institutions and scientific societies, is the only way to effectively fight against infectious diseases.

Lastly, I would like to highlight CIBERINFEC's commitment to disseminating knowledge and twinning research with society. The involvement of society in science and research is simply essential. Science is not only part of society, but must be mainly aimed at improving its conditions. We are all participants in science, and this is especially true and important in the field of health.

In this sense, through this web page we want to make the population aware of the main advances made in the field of Infectious Diseases, get their involvement and complicity in the fight against them and make ourselves available to them. Without a doubt, together we are much stronger.

Warm regards