I’ve never been terribly good at philosophy but I’m going to have a go, because this is a conversation that we need to have, especially as we see the re-emergence of measles. This post has been inspired by a fascinating opinion piece in the Lancet Microbe called “Embracing the monsters: moving from infection control to microbial management”. I think the ideas are crystallised into something like this: it’s futile to aim for “pathogen eradication” – “microbial management” is a better approach to juggling our resources to get to the best overall population health outcomes.