BIO SCI 45 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Sexually Transmitted Infection, Black Death, Zoonosis
28 May 2016
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Document Summary
Concepts of infectious disease and a history of epidemics. This chapter begins with a short introduction to epidemiology that is complementary to the more detailed discussion of the role of epidemiology in the. The reader is introduced to the term epidemic and the germ theory of infectious disease. The factors that affect the spread of epidemics are discussed in the next section; these factors include the number of susceptible individuals, the number of infected individuals, and the transmission rate of the infectious disease. The reader learns that the transmission rate of a disease depends on two components: inherent transmission efficiency of the infectious agent and the number of encounters between infected and uninfected individuals. The concepts of endemic disease, contagious disease, and acute versus chronic infections are also discussed and these concepts are represented diagrammatically in three simple figures. The term pandemic, used to describe an epidemic occurring concurrently on more than one continent, is also introduced.
