Only four years have passed since the sixth edition of ‘Faabook ofMicrobialogywas publithed, but rapid developments in the subject have made a new edition necessary During this short period, new infectious diseases have emerged or re-emerged in new forms. For example. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus appeared suddenly causing death and panic in many countries, and the Bird Flu virus posed repeated pandemic threats. Microbiology has become an increasingly important discipline, set to face new challenges. Exciting advances in diagnostic microbiology using sophisticated techniques can help in the rapid identification of new pathogens and serve to contain them. This was shown by the identification of the new SARS virus within weeks by concerted multi-disciplinary international t ffUl Lb. While such scientific progress is a boon, some of it can be potentially dangerous, as for instance in the recent case of chemical synthesis of a complete pathogenic poliovirus in the laboratory. In this edition, the seventh, relevant new information has been added and all chapters revised and updated, maintaining the general format of the book The Textbook of Microbiology has been in use now for more than a quarter of a century. It has benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions from students, teachers and other readers. Their help is gratefully acknowledged.
Many of the health problems in developing countries like India are different from those of developed countries. Bacterial diseases still play a considerable role in diseases in our cosuitry. Topics such as cholera and enteric diseases are important to us though only of less or academic interest to the developed countries. The increasing importune of the newer knowledge in immunology to health and disease is not adequately stressed in most of the extant textbooks. Virus diseases which are responsible for nearly 60 per cent of human illness require wider coverage. The general approach to the teaching of microbiology in our country has also been rather static. All these factors aged for a textbook of microbiology more suited to countries like India.
We therefore undertook this endeavour based on our experience of teaching undergraduates and postgraduates for over two &coda. We omitted the discipline of parasitology from our book since we already have an excellent textbook on the subject published in India.
This book has taken us over three years to write and over a year in publication. Naturally we would be out of date to a certain and inevitable extent. We do not claim any perfection. On the contrary, we have requested medical students and teachers all over the country to write to us about any shortcomings and give us suggestions as to how to improve the book. We shall spare no pains in seeing that their valuable suggestions are given effect to in our second edition.