Infectious Disease Notes and Vocabulary

What Are Diseases?  A disease is a breakdown in the structure and function of a living organism.  Diseases can be caused by different factors, such as germs, heredity, or the environment.

Infectious Diseases  Infectious diseases are caused mostly by microbes and they can often be passed from one person to another.  Ex: cold, chicken pox, flu

Microbes  Microbes are tiny living microorganisms that cannot be seen.  Ex: germs, bacteria

Spreading Infectious Diseases  A vector is an organism (other than a person) that spreads disease-causing germs usually without getting sick itself.  Ex: Tick = Lyme Disease

 A carrier of a disease shows NO symptoms of the disease but can transmit (give) it to others. Spreading Infectious Diseases

Society’s View  Society sometimes responds to people with infectious diseases with fear, prejudice, or cruelty.  One example is to quarantine people with the disease = isolating them to prevent the disease from spreading.  Ex: Typhoid Mary

Vaccines  Vaccines give you a tiny piece of the disease causing germ that is weak or dead.  Your body then makes antibodies to the disease.  Antibodies stay in your body and can fight the disease if you ever come in contact with it!

Preventing Infectious Diseases  Analyzing trends in how a disease spreads can suggest ways of preventing its further spread.  What do you think are some trends?

Epidemiologist  Epidemiologists track patterns of disease transmission in order to develop procedures to reduce the spread of disease.