Chapter 4 abstract and reflection.

Chapter 4 continued the discussion of epidemiology. It went more in depth in describing how diseases are classified and methods used to prevent and control health conditions. The public often identifies diseases by organ or organ systems (kidney disease, heart disease, respiratory infections) or by the agent causing the disease weather it be biological, chemical, or physical. Community health usually classifies disease by saying they are acute or chronic, or as being communicable or noncommunicable.
Acute diseases come and go within three months or less and chronic diseases have symptoms much longer and sometimes can last a persons entire life. Communicable disease are infectious and can be transmitted from one person to another and noncommunicable disease can not. Communicable disease are best understood by the communicable disease model. The model illustrates that for a disease to spread there must be an agent(the cause of the problem), a host(the susceptible organism), and an environment(any other factor to promote the transmission). Since noncommunicable disease can not be transmitted from person to person they can be caused by many things at once which is shown best by the multicausation disease model. This model shows that factors outside an individual such as; the environment, health care systems, economics, air pollution, water quality, and infectious disease outbreaks, mixed with ones personality, beliefs, and behavorial choices, and their genes all contribte to the occurance of noncommunicable disease.
The other part of the chapter that was really emphasized was about prevention, intervention and control. Control is the term used to refer to reducing transmission of communicable diseases since only small pox has ever been totally eradicated. Prevention is action taken before the occurance of a health condition and intervention is the action take after it is already evident. Prevention happens in stages, primary prevention happens before the disease precess begins, examples given were health education, safe housing projects, use of immunization, good personal hygiene, and the chloination of the community's water supply. If primary prevention is unsuccessful prompt intervention is next, also known as secondary prevention which is early diagnosis and treatment before diseases grow and become more severe, examples could be isolation, quarantine, and disinfection. Tertiary pervention is the rehabilitation for a patient.
One communicable disease that the book got in depth with was AIDS. This topic was our groups focus of connversation. The prevention and control of AIDS has been an ongoing project for health professionals. Healthy People 2010 has objectives focused at preventive mesures of AIDS one being to "increase the proportion of condom use by partners of sexually active unmarried females". When talking about the control of AIDS we looked at the chain of infection; the links of the chain represent the pathogen, the human reservoir, the portal of exit, transmission, the portal of entry, and the establishment of disease in new host. The book presented us with a prevention and control strategey for each link in reference to the AIDS virus. We also noted that the reservoir for HIV is the infected human population only, there are no known animal or insect reservoirs. Small pox, as mention early, is the only comminicable disease that has ever been eliminated completely in all of history and this was made possible simply because humans were the reseroir for the small pox virus as well. It strange to think that by knowing this similarity and by seeing that each step on the chain of infection has a control method we are still so far away from eradicating the disease. 944, 305 infected people were reported to the CDC through december 2004. If we would help ourselves by taking primary prevention actions seriously we could begin to reduce this number which is what Healthy People 2010 is trying to promote.