Ferrara One of the deans of the Sant’Anna hospital, Marco Belgiore, director of Infectious Diseases and number one infectious disease specialist not only at a local level during the Covid emergency and even before that, for HIV, is retiring in June after more than forty years. It does so in his “style”: an international conference of a scientific nature for “updates on the most important novelties from an epidemiological, clinical, therapeutic and preventive point of view in the field of infectious pathology”. The appointment is for tomorrow, from 8.30 to 13.30 in the Aula Magna of the Cona hospital.
«At 70, I’m a little sad to leave this activity, but I realize that things have changed to the point that artificial intelligence has found itself carrying out part of our work. What can never change – underlines the dean of Ferrara’s infectious disease specialists – is the irreplaceable human relationship with patients”. Looking back at his activity, Bibbiare does not hesitate to talk about “two pandemics faced, and one just around the corner”. The first, which perhaps left the strongest mark, is that of HIV: «I remember well the first case of AIDS in Ferrara, in 1984, since then people got infected without even knowing how and died. The most important turning point was in ’96, when the cure arrived with the cocktail of drugs and we saw that people were no longer dying. Then, of course, Covid, here too we went from not seeing the possibility of concrete intervention to the vaccine and then to truly effective antiviral drugs, in a very short time.”
The next pandemic, he warns, will be caused by antibiotic resistance, «studies say that in 2025 there will be a greater risk of dying from resistant infections than from heart problems. There are new drugs but they are very selective and must be administered by specialists. Then there is hepatitis which also needs to be controlled here with drugs. Ultimately, the disappearance of infectious diseases is unfortunately not in sight.”
He, he says, will take advantage of his retirement “to spend a while with my wife, who, working for 10-12 a day, has seen little of me, and with my daughter who is 35 years old”. L
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