The immediate causes of disease as belonging to two distinct types-
Disease-causing organisms can be found in a wide variety of these classification categories.
They include viruses, bacteria, fungus, single-celled animals, and protozoans, among other types of organisms.
Multicellular creatures like various types of worms can also cause some diseases
Common examples of diseases caused by viruses are the common cold, influenza, dengue fever and AIDS. Diseases like typhoid fever, cholera, tuberculosis and anthrax are caused by bacteria.
Many common skin infections are caused by different kinds of fungi.
Protozoan microbes cause many familiar diseases, such as malaria and kalaazar.
All of us have also come across intestinal worm infections, as well as diseases like elephantiasis caused by diffferent species of worms.
These infectious bacteria have the ability to travel via the air. This happens as a result of the microscopic droplets that an infected individual coughs or sneezes release . These droplets can be inhaled by someone nearby, giving the bacteria a chance to establish a new infection. The common cold, coronavirus disease (COVID-19), pneumonia, and tuberculosis are a few examples of such illnesses that spread through the air.
Diseases can also be spread through water. This occurs if the excreta from someone suffering from an infectious gut disease, such as cholera, get mixed with the drinking water used by people living nearby. The choleracausing microbes will enter a healthy person through the water they drink and cause disease in them. Such diseases are much more likely to spread in the absence of safe supplies of drinking water
The sexual act is one of the closest physical contact two people can have with each other. Not surprisingly, there are microbial infections such as syphilis or AIDS that are transmitted by sexual contact from one partner to the other. However, such sexually transmitted diseases are not spread by casual physical contact. Casual physical contacts include handshakes or hugs or sports, like wrestling, or by any of the other ways in which we touch each other socially. Other than the sexual contact, the virus causing AIDS (HIV) can also spread through blood-to-blood contact with infected people or from an infected mother to her baby during pregnancy or through breast feeding. , in HIV infection, the virus goes to the immune system and damages its function. Thus, many of the effects of HIV-AIDS are because the body can no longer fight off the many minor infections that we face everyday. Instead, every small cold can become pneumonia.
we can provide treatment that will reduce the symptoms. The symptoms are usually because of inflammation. For example, we can take medicines that bring down fever, reduce pain or loose motions. We can take bed rest so that we can conserve our energy. This will enable us to have more of it available to focus on healing.
How do we kill microbes? One way is to use medicines that kill microbes. We have seen earlier that microbes can be classified into different categories. They are viruses, bacteria, fungi or protozoa. Each of these groups of organisms will have some essential biochemical life process which is peculiar to that group and not shared with the other groups. These processes may be pathways for the synthesis of new substances or respiration. These pathways will not be used by us either. For example, our cells may make new substances by a mechanism different from that used by bacteria. We have to find a drug that blocks the bacterial synthesis pathway without affecting our own. This is what is achieved by the antibiotics that we are all familiar with. Similarly, there are drugs that kill protozoa such as the malarial parasite.
One reason why making anti-viral medicines is harder than making antibacterial medicines is that viruses have few biochemical mechanisms of their own. They enter our cells and use our machinery for their life processes. This means that there are relatively few virus-specific targets to aim at. Despite this limitation, there are now effective anti-viral drugs, for example, the drugs that keep HIV infection under control.