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“The
purpose of medicine is to prevent significant disease, to
decrease pain and to postpone death... Technology has
to support these goals-if not, it may even be
counterproductive.” Dr.
Joel J. Nobel
"Infectious
diseases, also known as contagious
diseases or transmissible diseases, and
include communicable diseases, comprise
clinically evident
illness
(i.e., characteristic
medical signs
and/or
symptoms
of
disease)
resulting from the
infection,
presence and growth of
pathogenic
biological
agents in an individual
host
organism. In certain cases, infectious
diseases may be asymptomatic for much or
all of their course. Infectious
pathogens include some
viruses,
bacteria,
fungi,
protozoa,
multicellular
parasites,
and aberrant proteins known as
prions.
These pathogens are the cause of disease
epidemics,
in the sense that without the pathogen,
no infectious epidemic occurs.
Transmission
of pathogen can occur in various ways
including physical contact, contaminated
food, body fluids, objects, airborne
inhalation, or through
vector
organisms. Infectious diseases that are
especially infective are sometimes
called
contagious
and can be easily transmitted by contact
with an ill person or their secretions.
Infectious diseases with more
specialized routes of infection, such as
vector transmission or sexual
transmission, are usually regarded as
contagious but do not require medical
quarantine
of victims. The term
infectivity
describes the ability of an organism to
enter, survive and multiply in the host,
while the infectiousness of a
disease indicates the comparative ease
with which the disease is transmitted to
other hosts. An infection is not
synonymous
with an infectious disease, as some
infections do not cause illness in a
host".
Source:
Wikipedia
"Infectious
diseases, also known as contagious
diseases or transmissible diseases, and
include communicable diseases, comprise
clinically evident