Public Health Microbio Lecture 1: Introduction
1. Public Health is basically what we as a society do to assure conditions of people are healthy in
micro
o ID agents of disease (human, animal)
o Determine antibiotic sensitivity patterns & emerging drug resistance
o Isolate causative agents from food, patient specimens
o Monitor the drinking, marine, recreational waters for presence of health-threatening
organisms
o
Monitor emergence, spread & trends of the disease through surveillance studes,
collaberate with levels of government and agencies
o Evaluate our testing systems for effectiveness
o Ensure that people are following regulations
o Quality assurance again basically lab quality control and performance
2. Brief history: William Farr vs John snow, Ignaz Summelweis
Public Health Microbio Lecture 2: Epidemiology
3. Epidemiology: basically factors that influence frequency and distribution of diseases such as
psychology, sociology, microbiology, ecology, and statistics. The procedure involved in epidemiology
is monitoring --> studying --> control --> containment of infectious disease. The procedure can be
done by professionals or institutions and done on various levels of government.
o
ID cause of disease and risk factors, find extent it spread, then its natural history &
prognosis, then evaluate preventative & therapeutic measures & mode of delivery of serves,
provide foundation to make public policy
4. Communicable vs noncommunicable diseases
5. Resevoir; natural habitat of disease-causing organism, is the virus found on animals, humans,
environment, multiple environments.
6. Transmision: direct, fomite contact, droplet transmission, air or vectors.
o Direct --> person to person or from natural host, fomite --> usually inanimate object that
horizontally transmits organism without being the intermediate host
o Vector --> Living organism that acts as an intermediate host for the completion of part
lifecycle of pathogen. They are specific for the disease they spread therefore not like fomite
which is inanimate and non-selective.
o Droplet transmission--> water/humidity. Air transmission --> from air
o Fecal oral route vs Common source outbreaks vs cross
contamination
o
Also transmission could occur in individuals that are asymptomatic this heavily depends
on the carrier status.
o Note portals of entry & modes of transmission & resevoir
7. Rate of disease; % of population affected, attack rate the # people that get the disease after being
introduced to it. Morbidity ratevs mortality rate
8. Incidence vs prevalence
9. Disease spreading in a population terms;
o Sporadic --> occasionally iregularrly
o Endemic --> constantly present in population
o Epidemic --> large number of cases in population comes from outbreaks and outbreaks
start from index cases o
Pandemic --> it’s epidemic over large geographic area
10. There are some factors which affect the factors which cause the disease to spread or the
epidemiology of the diseases. They are infectious ose, incubation period and characteristics of the
host population.
o Infectious dose; # of microbes to kill 50% of the exposed hosts
o
Incubation period: how long from introduction t
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