Traditional Indian and Chinese medicinal systems sometimes deliberately rubbed the skin crusts from smallpox victims into the skin of healthy people. They thus hoped to induce a mild form of smallpox that would create resistance against the disease. Famously, two centuries ago, an English physician named Edward Jenner, realised that milkmaids who had had cowpox …
All of what we have talked about so far deals with how to get rid of an infection in someone who has the disease. But there are three limitations of this approach to dealing with infectious disease. The first is that once someone has a disease, their body functions are damaged and may never recover …
Based on what we have learnt so far, it would appear that there are two ways to treat an infectious disease. One would be to reduce the effects of the disease and the other to kill the cause of the disease. For the first, we can provide treatment that will reduce the symptoms. The symptoms …
Different species of microbes seem to have evolved to home in on different parts of the body. In part, this selection is connected to their point of entry. If they enter from the air via the nose, they are likely to go to the lungs. This is seen in the bacteria causing tuberculosis. If they …
ORGAN-SPECIFIC AND TISSUE – SPECIFIC MANIFESTATIONS Read More »
Many microbial agents can commonly move from an affected person to someone else in a variety of ways. In other words, they can be ‘communicated’, and so are also called communicable diseases. Such disease-causing microbes can spread through the air. This occurs through the little droplets thrown out by an infected person who sneezes or …
We have seen that the entire diversity seen in the living world can be classified into a few groups. This classification is based on common characteristics between different organisms. Organisms that can cause disease are found in a wide range of such categories of classification. Some of them are viruses, some are bacteria, some are …
For many years, everybody used to think that peptic ulcers, which cause acidity– related pain and bleeding in the stomach and duodenum, were because of lifestyle reasons. Everybody thought that a stressful life led to a lot of acid secretion in the stomach, and eventually caused peptic ulcers. Then two Australians made a discovery that …
As we have seen, it is important to keep public health and community health factors in mind when we think about causes of diseases. Wecan take that approach a little further. It is useful to think of the immediate causes of disease as belonging to two distinct types. Onegroup of causes is the infectious agents, …
If there is a baby suffering from loose motions, we can say that the cause of the loose motions is probably an infection. we find that the infection came through unclean drinking water. But many babies must have had this unclean drinking water. So, why is it that onebaby developed loose motions when the other …
Acute and chronic diseases have different effects on our health. Any disease that causes poor functioning of some part of the body will affect our health. This is because all functions of the body are necessary for being healthy. But an acute disease, which is over very soon, will not have time to cause major …
