Infectious diseases are diseases caused by organisms such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, or parasites. The continuous growth of the Human population is causing an increase in the spread of infectious diseases. Due to the growth of the spread of infectious diseases the human population is decreasing. I feel like the bigger the population gets, the more infectious diseases spread more rapidly because of the indirect and direct effects population growth has on humans.
¨The spectrum of human pathogens and the infectious diseases they cause is continuously changing through evolution and changes in the way human populations interact with their environment and each other. New human pathogens most often emerge from an animal reservoir, emphasizing the central role that non-human reservoirs play in human infectious diseases. Pathogens may also reemerge with new characteristics, such as multidrug resistance, or in different places, such as West Nile virus in the USA in 1999, to cause new epidemics.¨ Human pathogens is just a pathogen that causes diseases in humans. With the population continuing to grow, the human pathogens build more adaptability to the previous infectious diseases and when new diseases like ebola pop up the immune system are invaded with these new pathogens that the body doesn’t recognize and in turn won’t be able to fight off which leads to the spreading of the disease to others.
Save your time!
We can take care of your essay
- Proper editing and formatting
- Free revision, title page, and bibliography
- Flexible prices and money-back guarantee
When our immune system is attacked by new pathogens, the body does not know how to react. Our bodies try to sneeze it out cough it out, bleed it out or etc. So those bodily fluids amongst other things can easily be transferred to the next person which is why emerging infectious diseases have such a big impact on the human population. Once uncontrollable diseases start getting spread a lot of people lose their lives.
The species jump is when a human makes unusual contact with an animal, getting infected by what they have then spread that back to the human populous. This is another reason of how human actions bring risk on the spread of infectious diseases. Also when humans travel to different countries and bring things back to their home country. Although in this day and age our technology is superly advanced and we have vaccinations and treatments for almost everything, we will never be fully rid of infectious diseases due to the production of new strands of the same pathogens from previous times.
“Three components are essential for most infectious diseases: an agent (or pathogen), a host (or vector), and transmission environment (Epstein, 2001a). Some pathogens are carried by vectors or require intermediate hosts to complete their lifecycle. Appropriate climate and weather conditions are necessary for the survival, reproduction, distribution and transmission of disease pathogens, vectors, and hosts. Therefore, changes in climate or weather conditions may impact infectious diseases by affecting the pathogens, vectors, hosts and their living environment (Epstein, 2001a, Wu et al., 2014). Studies have found that long-term climate warming tends to favor the geographic expansion of several infectious diseases (Epstein et al., 1998, Ostfeld and Brunner, 2015, Rodó et al., 2013) and that extreme weather events may help create opportunities for more clustered disease outbreaks or outbreaks at non-traditional places and time (Epstein, 2000). Overall, climate conditions constrain the geographic and seasonal distributions of infectious diseases, and weather affects the timing and intensity of disease outbreaks (Kuhn et al., 2005, Wu et al., 2014).”From this excerpt, we are informed that the weather and climate change has a major part in infectious diseases. So we know why there are different types of diseases in different climates and some of the same ones too. We can also infer that the human population plays a part in this as well due to loitering and producing harmful chemicals that harm the Ozone layer which in turn makes earth's climates warmer, and more bacteria and parasitic things tend to live in warmth. The climate's tendency to be warmer due to humans not taking more care of the earth leads to more emerging infectious diseases.
“The earth today is populated by more than seven billion humans (1), and we are affecting every part of the planet, directly or through worldwide pollution and climate changes (2). Anthropogenic environmental changes threaten human health by causing food and water scarcity, increasing the risks for natural disasters and displacements of populations, and increasing the risks of infectious diseases (3), which is the main focus of this review.”As the population grows so does the likelihood of catching an infectious disease grow too. Infectious diseases get worse as the population gets bigger because of the scarcity of water and other strongly suggested tools for survival. In another excerpt, it states “ By the end of this century, Earth may be home to 11 billion people, the United Nations has estimated, earlier than previously expected. As part of a week-long series, LiveScience is exploring what reaching this population milestone might mean for our planet, from our ability to feed that many people to our impact on the other species that call Earth home to our efforts to land on other planets.” If the earth overpopulates the rupture of emerging infectious diseases will grow out of control.
This chart shows a rise in Hiv in the population over some years. Hiv is an example of an incurable infectious disease that can be transmitted through bodily fluids. When Hiv first emerged it killed lots of people because the spreading of it happened so quickly due to humans not being able to get treated for it or not even knowing they had it.
In conclusion, I feel as if we do not control the situation now, then later in the near future, we will face another horrible pandemic killing millions of people. The spread of infectious diseases to humans could be controlled by human actions. In order to steer clear of another pandemic, like the bubonic plague, we humans must work together to stop unnaturally interfering with animals, take more care of our planet, and seek medical attention when their bodies feel unusual.
Works cited page:
- Doorn, H. Rogier Van. “Emerging Infectious Diseases.” Medicine, vol. 45, no. 12, 2017, pp. 798–801., doi:10.1016/j.mpmed.2017.09.002.
- Gholipour, Bahar. “What 11 Billion People Mean for Disease Outbreaks.” Scientific American, 26 Nov. 2013, www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-11-billion-people-mean-disease-outbreaks/.
- “Impact of Climate Change on Human Infectious Diseases: Empirical Evidence and Human Adaptation.” Environment International, Pergamon, 18 Oct. 2015, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412015300489.
- Lindahl, Johanna F., and Delia Grace. “The Consequences of Human Actions on Risks for Infectious Diseases: a Review.” Infection Ecology & Epidemiology, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, p. 30048., doi:10.3402/iee.v5.30048.
- OpenStax. “Microbiology.” Lumen, courses.lumenlearning.com/microbiology/chapter/the-language-of-epidemiologists/.
Stuck on your essay?
