In 1970, the US Surgeon General is said to have declared that it was time to “close the book on infectious diseases, declare the war against pestilence won and shift national resources to such chronic problems as cancer and heart disease”. Though this attribution has been disputed,1 the undoubted optimism of that era over infectious disease now seems a world away, after a year in which Ebola both reached and was transmitted within the United States of America. In recent years we have been alarmed by the re-emergence of ancient diseases in newly resistant form—particularly gonorrhoea and tuberculosis. This month, Tuddenham and Ghanem's editorial introduces a mini-series on the threat of antimicrobial resistant …