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.