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Volume 72, Issue 3

The foundations of aetiology: a common language for infection science Open Access

Abstract

With the adoption of as an umbrella term for the disciplines that inform our ideas of infection, there is a need for a common language that links infection’s constituent parts. This paper develops a conceptual framework for infection science from the major themes used to understand causal relationships in infectious diseases. The paper proposes using the four main themes from the to classify infection knowledge into four corresponding domains: Clinical microbiology, Public health microbiology, Mechanisms of microbial disease and Antimicrobial countermeasures. This epistemology of infection gives form and process to a revised infection ontology and an infectious disease heuristic. Application of the proposed epistemology has immediate practical implications for organization of journal content, promotion of inter-disciplinary collaboration, identification of emerging priority themes, and integration of cross-disciplinary areas such as One Health topics and antimicrobial resistance. Starting with these foundations, we can build a coherent narrative around the idea of infection that shapes the practice of infection science.

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Keyword(s): antimicrobial agents , antimicrobial resistance , clinical microbiology , infection science , microbial forensics , molecular epidemiology , one health , ontology of infection , pathogenesis , pathophysiology , public health microbiology and root cause analysis
© 2023 The Authors
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This article was made open access via a Publish and Read agreement between the Microbiology Society and the corresponding author’s institution.
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/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.001637
2023-03-14
2024-04-26
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