Essays on Viral Disease

Q1

Tetanus

It is a disease caused by bacteria known as clostridium tetani. It affects the nervous system leading to muscle contractions. Tetanus has no cure. We use antibiotics to prevent its complications.

Common cold

It is a viral infection affecting the upper respiratory tract. Viruses spread through droplets. Antibiotics cannot be used to treat common cold.

Influenza

It is also a viral disease affecting the upper respiratory tract. It is also known as the flu. Treatment is use of antiviral drugs (Krasner and Shors).

Cholera

It is an acute infection caused by ingestion of contaminated food or water characterized by diarrhea and vomiting. ...

Ebola virus made its way to the headlines for the very first time in the late 1970s as the population of Congo and Sudan suffer from a deadly hemorrhagic fever. While it was thought that such outbreaks were controlled in Africa and the rest of the world, the virus startled the United States once again in the year 1989—ten years after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak in Africa (Peters and LeDuc, 1999). Today, Ebola virus continues to haunt the people all over the world as the World Health Organization disclosed another outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, ...

- Timeline of Ebola Outbreaks The world first came to know about Ebola virus in the late 1970s through a series of hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Congo and Sudan. Since then traditional quarantine methods were employed to control the outbreak from the clinics and hospitals in Africa. Research efforts on Ebola began to diminish upon the report of an isolated case in Tandala and a small outbreak in Sudan. However, ten years later (1989) Ebola virus re-emerged on cynomolgous monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) in a research facility in Reston, Virginia in the United States. Such outbreak prompted several laboratory studies to understand ...

Introduction

Bronchiolitis is an infection in the lower tract of the respiratory system common amongst children. “The major cause of the infection is RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) accounting for over 90% of infections in Australian children and infants” (Lenney 2009, p. 36). Globally, it is a leading cause of infant hospitalization being associated with increasing morbidity rates and costs in recent decades. For instance, it was reported that 21% of infants in North America developed the disease in the first year of their life, with an annual cost of $390 million annually (Checchia 2008). In the UK, the infant death rate ...