Recent advances in infectious diseases

Dominik Mertz, MD, MSc, is an associate professor of medicine and director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at McMaster University.

If you were to name the 3 most important recent advances in infectious diseases that are relevant for everyday practice, what would they be?

That’s difficult to identify the 3 most important novel treatments or vaccines at this point, but I think given that we are just going through a pandemic, COVID-19 is on the top of my list. So certainly the mRNA vaccines, which were a major game changer for us during the pandemic.

Also the treatment options like Paxlovid [nirmatrelvir/ritonavir], but also identifying remdesivir as an option and the monoclonal antibodies that we got to treat those at highest risk. It is certainly important to note this.

What’s very important to me is that we need more antibiotics as well. We shouldn’t forget about our antimicrobial resistance pandemic.