Sometimes, quite unexpectedly, the imagination creates images that become a reflection of what you see in the moment and what you once read about but would never have remembered in another minute...

...I was walking around Astrakhan on a warm May day. There are still a lot of crooked, uncomfortable narrow streets and dilapidated wooden houses half-grown into the ground, which, perhaps, remember Alyosha Peshkov. And suddenly I imagined: the middle of the nineteenth century, over the city there is weeping coming from such houses, coffins are carried on carts along the same streets, crows are circling over the graveyards. Cholera... “Indian disease”, which reached the Volga town either from Turkmenistan or Iran. And from there - all over the Volga region, and further on to both capitals.

...Wandering around the ruins of the Genoese fortress - a grandiose fortification in the Crimea, I caught a fresh breeze from the shore of Feodosia Bay, admiring the power and perfection of architectural design. And again my imagination carried my thoughts to distant times, when the Mongolian army under the command of Khan Janibek for the first time in world history used a kind of biological weapon. The plague began to spread in his camp, and the Khan ordered to cut the corpses of the dead into pieces and throw them over the wall with the help of catapults. An epidemic broke out in the fortress: the black bird of the deadly disease flitted from house to house, and after the siege was lifted, the Genoese on merchant ships spread the plague throughout Europe.

We have devoted this issue to infectious diseases. And I am grateful for invaluable help in its creation to the staff of the Infectious Diseases Department of the Belarusian State Medical University. Special thanks go to Nikita Vladimirovich Solovy, who delighted me with his responsibility and attention to detail at all stages of our joint work.

Prof. I.V. Egorov