While the world believed that COVID-19 had relaxed its grip, another alarm sounded—the comeback of dengue in Southeast Asia, the bird flu epidemic in poultry farms, and the silent spread of measles infections among communities believed to be immune. It seems like the world is engaged in a perpetual rat race with diseases that continuously make a comeback. The sobering reality is that epidemics are less an anomaly and more of a pattern, and societal complacency has ensured that the cycle has become a nasty new normalcy.
The news comes around every few months with a spooky sense of déjà vu: hospitals at capacity, health care workers working round the clock, worried parents queuing up for jabs or meds. It’s like the world itself keeps sending new tests of stamina. But these epidemics are not acts of nature; they’re markers of how irresponsibly we’ve treated the world and our healthcare infrastructures. The climate has changed mosquito breeding patterns, deforestation has pushed wild viruses onto the doorstep of human settlements, and overpopulation in cities has made contagion a matter of daily life. We’re not just innocent victims of nature—also its coconspirators.
Take dengue, for instance. What was once seasonal is now operating nearly the whole year round in most tropical cities, including the Philippines. Gridlocked roads, untreated garbage, and clogged drains are ideal breeding sites for mosquitoes. Nevertheless, due to years of warnings, most communities are still deaf to the clamor for sanitation. The city’s fogging program and health advisories could only do so much with popular support still lukewarm. It is pathetic how something tiny—a mosquito—has managed to thrive on something enormous—our neglect.
New flu strains continue to mutate, evading our vaccines and frontiers. With each epidemic, the avian flu that was initially confined to chicken farms now poses the threat of leaping species. International trade, widespread travel, and the long-term human incursion into wildlife preserves render such leaps ever more possible. We inhabit an interconnected world in which a virus can spread faster than the airline refund. The same roads and flights that tie economies together are highways for disease.
There’s another contagion as lethal as complacency. People have gotten tired of health warnings. Post-COVID-19, everyone shrugged off the next epidemic as “just another flu.” Public attention to Danger has withered away, and governments are too consumed by politicking to prepare. Research, surveillance, and preventive healthcare budgets are regularly slashed to finance more visible projects that vote rather than save lives. The result is predictable: every new epidemic finds us unprepared, as if it were the initial time.
Even information crisis feeds the flames. Social media, rather than informing people, spreads misinformation quickly than any virus. Misinformation regarding vaccines, falsified cures, and unwarranted panic spread over the internet, undermining people’s trust in science and physicians. Wherever the truth can save lives today, falsehood is a costly luxury that kills. Health literacy ought to have improved following decades of worldwide pandemics, but superstition rather than science still takes the hearts of many people.
And amidst it all, epidemics lay bare not only our human frailty but also our ability to respond, adapt, and survive. Neighborhoods have begun organizing cleanups, governments have started incorporating disease monitoring into climate information, and doctors keep attending even when fatigue nibbles at their heels. There are rays of hope in the midst of the mayhem–hopes that humanity, though typically reckless, is still capable of mercy and penance.
But now it is time to cease reacting to outbreaks as temporary crises rather than permanent realities of our time. Prevention must be a habit, not an afterthought.
Sanitation must become a collective responsibility, not a campaign slogan. And public health must transcend politics because bacteria do not belong to a party. The sole means of stopping this heartless cycle of recurrent epidemics is to learn at last and once and for all what every epidemic has been struggling to instruct us—that survival is not merely a question of medicine, but of responsibility.
