Posts

Showing posts from November, 2020

Infection

Image
An infection is the invasion of an organism's body tissues by disease-causing agents, their multiplication, and the reaction of host tissues to the infectious agents and the toxins they produce. An infectious disease , also known as a transmissible disease or communicable disease , is an illness resulting from an infection. Infections are caused by infectious agents (pathogens) including: Hosts can fight infections using their immune system. Mammalian hosts react to infections with an innate response, often involving inflammation, followed by an adaptive response. Specific medications used to treat infections include antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, antiprotozoals, and antihelminthics. Infectious diseases resulted in 9.2 million deaths in 2013 (about 17% of all deaths). The branch of medicine that focuses on infections is referred to as infectious disease.

Classification

Image
Subclinical versus clinical (latent versus apparent) edit Symptomatic infections are apparent and clinical , whereas an infection that is active but does not produce noticeable symptoms may be called inapparent, silent, subclinical , or occult. An infection that is inactive or dormant is called a latent infection . An example of a latent bacterial infection is latent tuberculosis. Some viral infections can also be latent, examples of latent viral infections are any of those from the Herpesviridae family. The word infection can denote any presence of a particular pathogen at all (no matter how little) but also is often used in a sense implying a clinically apparent infection (in other words, a case of infectious disease). This fact occasionally creates some ambiguity or prompts some usage discussion; to get around this it is common for health professionals to speak of colonization (rather than infection ) when they mean that some of the pathogens are present but that no clinicall...

Signs and symptoms

Image
The symptoms of an infection depend on the type of disease. Some signs of infection affect the whole body generally, such as fatigue, loss of appetite, weight loss, fevers, night sweats, chills, aches and pains. Others are specific to individual body parts, such as skin rashes, coughing, or a runny nose. In certain cases, infectious diseases may be asymptomatic for much or even all of their course in a given host. In the latter case, the disease may only be defined as a "disease" (which by definition means an illness) in hosts who secondarily become ill after contact with an asymptomatic carrier. An infection is not synonymous with an infectious disease, as some infections do not cause illness in a host. Bacterial or viral edit As bacterial and viral infections can both cause the same kinds of symptoms, it can be difficult to distinguish which is the cause of a specific infection. Distinguishing the two is important, since viral infections cannot be cured by antibiotics where...

Pathophysiology

Image
There is a general chain of events that applies to infections. The chain of events involves several steps – which include the infectious agent, reservoir, entering a susceptible host, exit and transmission to new hosts. Each of the links must be present in a chronological order for an infection to develop. Understanding these steps helps health care workers target the infection and prevent it from occurring in the first place. Colonization edit Infection begins when an organism successfully enters the body, grows and multiplies. This is referred to as colonization. Most humans are not easily infected. Those with compromised or weakened immune systems have an increased susceptibility to chronic or persistent infections. Individuals who have a suppressed immune system are particularly susceptible to opportunistic infections. Entrance to the host at host-pathogen interface, generally occurs through the mucosa in orifices like the oral cavity, nose, eyes, genitalia, anus, or the microbe ca...

Diagnosis

Image
This section needs additional citations for verification . Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( December 2019 ) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Diagnosis of infectious disease sometimes involves identifying an infectious agent either directly or indirectly. In practice most minor infectious diseases such as warts, cutaneous abscesses, respiratory system infections and diarrheal diseases are diagnosed by their clinical presentation and treated without knowledge of the specific causative agent. Conclusions about the cause of the disease are based upon the likelihood that a patient came in contact with a particular agent, the presence of a microbe in a community, and other epidemiological considerations. Given sufficient effort, all known infectious agents can be specifically identified. The benefits of identification, however, are often greatly outweighed by the cost, as often...

Prevention

Image
Techniques like hand washing, wearing gowns, and wearing face masks can help prevent infections from being passed from one person to another. Aseptic technique was introduced in medicine and surgery in the late 19th century and greatly reduced the incidence of infections caused by surgery. Frequent hand washing remains the most important defense against the spread of unwanted organisms. There are other forms of prevention such as avoiding the use of illicit drugs, using a condom, wearing gloves, and having a healthy lifestyle with a balanced diet and regular exercise. Cooking foods well and avoiding foods that have been left outside for a long time is also important. Antimicrobial substances used to prevent transmission of infections include: antiseptics, which are applied to living tissue/skin disinfectants, which destroy microorganisms found on non-living objects. antibiotics, called prophylactic when given as prevention rather as treatment of infection. However, long term use of a...

Treatments

Image
When infection attacks the body, anti-infective drugs can suppress the infection. Several broad types of anti-infective drugs exist, depending on the type of organism targeted; they include antibacterial (antibiotic; including antitubercular), antiviral, antifungal and antiparasitic (including antiprotozoal and antihelminthic) agents. Depending on the severity and the type of infection, the antibiotic may be given by mouth or by injection, or may be applied topically. Severe infections of the brain are usually treated with intravenous antibiotics. Sometimes, multiple antibiotics are used in case there is resistance to one antibiotic. Antibiotics only work for bacteria and do not affect viruses. Antibiotics work by slowing down the multiplication of bacteria or killing the bacteria. The most common classes of antibiotics used in medicine include penicillin, cephalosporins, aminoglycosides, macrolides, quinolones and tetracyclines. Not all infections require treatment, and for many self...

Epidemiology

Image
In 2010, about 10 million people died of infectious diseases. The World Health Organization collects information on global deaths by International Classification of Disease (ICD) code categories. The following table lists the top infectious disease by number of deaths in 2002. 1993 data is included for comparison. Worldwide mortality due to infectious diseases Rank Cause of death Deaths 2002 (in millions) Percentage of all deaths Deaths 1993 (in millions) 1993 Rank N/A All infectious diseases 14.7 25.9% 16.4 32.2% 1 Lower respiratory infections 3.9 6.9% 4.1 1 2 HIV/AIDS 2.8 4.9% 0.7 7 3 Diarrheal diseases 1.8 3.2% 3.0 2 4 Tuberculosis (TB) 1.6 2.7% 2.7 3 5 Malaria 1.3 2.2% 2.0 4 6 Measles 0.6 1.1% 1.1 5 7 Pertussis 0.29 0.5% 0.36 7 8 Tetanus 0.21 0.4% 0.15 12 9 Meningitis 0.17 0.3% 0.25 8 10 Syphilis 0.16 0.3% 0.19 11 11 Hepatitis B 0.10 0.2% 0.93 6 12–17 Tropical diseases (6) 0.13 0.2%...

Germ theory of disease

Image
In Antiquity, the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 400 BC) was the first person to write, in his account of the plague of Athens, that diseases could spread from an infected person to others. In his On the Different Types of Fever (c. AD 175), the Greco-Roman physician Galen speculated that plagues were spread by "certain seeds of plague", which were present in the air. In the Sushruta Samhita, the ancient Indian physician Sushruta theorized: "Leprosy, fever, consumption, diseases of the eye, and other infectious diseases spread from one person to another by sexual union, physical contact, eating together, sleeping together, sitting together, and the use of same clothes, garlands and pastes." This book has been dated to about the sixth century BC. A basic form of contagion theory was proposed by Persian physician Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in Europe) in The Canon of Medicine (1025), which later became the most authoritative medical textbook in Europe up un...

Society and culture

Image
A number of studies have reported associations between pathogen load in an area and human behavior. Higher pathogen load is associated with decreased size of ethnic and religious groups in an area. This may be due high pathogen load favoring avoidance of other groups, which may reduce pathogen transmission, or a high pathogen load preventing the creation of large settlements and armies that enforce a common culture. Higher pathogen load is also associated with more restricted sexual behavior, which may reduce pathogen transmission. It also associated with higher preferences for health and attractiveness in mates. Higher fertility rates and shorter or less parental care per child is another association that may be a compensation for the higher mortality rate. There is also an association with polygyny which may be due to higher pathogen load, making selecting males with a high genetic resistance increasingly important. Higher pathogen load is also associated with more collectivism and l...

Fossil record

Image
Evidence of infection in fossil remains is a subject of interest for paleopathologists, scientists who study occurrences of injuries and illness in extinct life forms. Signs of infection have been discovered in the bones of carnivorous dinosaurs. When present, however, these infections seem to tend to be confined to only small regions of the body. A skull attributed to the early carnivorous dinosaur Herrerasaurus ischigualastensis exhibits pit-like wounds surrounded by swollen and porous bone. The unusual texture of the bone around the wounds suggests they were afflicted by a short-lived, non-lethal infection. Scientists who studied the skull speculated that the bite marks were received in a fight with another Herrerasaurus . Other carnivorous dinosaurs with documented evidence of infection include Acrocanthosaurus , Allosaurus , Tyrannosaurus and a tyrannosaur from the Kirtland Formation. The infections from both tyrannosaurs were received by being bitten during a fight, like the He...

Outer space

A 2006 Space Shuttle experiment found that Salmonella typhimurium , a bacterium that can cause food poisoning, became more virulent when cultivated in space. On April 29, 2013, scientists in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, funded by NASA, reported that, during spaceflight on the International Space Station, microbes seem to adapt to the space environment in ways "not observed on Earth" and in ways that "can lead to increases in growth and virulence". More recently, in 2017, bacteria were found to be more resistant to antibiotics and to thrive in the near-weightlessness of space. Microorganisms have been observed to survive the vacuum of outer space.