Health and its failure

Health
It is a state of physical, mental and social well being. It cannot be something that
each one of us can achieve entirely on our own.

Factors that affect health:

1. Social environment is an important factor in our individual health.
2. Public cleanliness is important for individual health.
 Healthy Disease- free
1. A healthy person is always disease-free. 1. A disease-free person need not be
2. Health refers to social, mental and healthy always.
physical well being. 2. Disease refers to disturbed ease and
disease-free means that our physical
ease is not disturbed.
Disease and its causes
As mentioned earlier, disease refers to disturbed ease. It can be caused by
many factors and to people of any age group.

Factors that cause various diseases

1. Unclean surroundings (e.g. polluted air, unclean drinking water, etc.)
2. Lack of good nourishment ( i.e. lack of nutrient rich food, exercise, etc.)
3. Lack of public service ( i.e. various facilities like hospitals, proper care,
etc.)

It is not that diseases are caused by any one of these factors but are caused by contribution of all these factors together.
Types of diseases
There are basically two types of diseases
1. Acute disease: These diseases last for a short period of time. They do not get time to
harm our body and therefore, cause very less damage.
2. Chronic disease: These diseases last for a much longer time. They harm our body to a
great extent. Some of these diseases might not be recoverable and continue to persist
their effect on our body throughout lifetime.

On the basis of their mode of infection, diseases are of two types:

1. Infectious / communicable disease: These diseases transfer from microbes or
micro-organisms. This is because the microbes can spread in the community,
and the diseases they cause will spread with them.
2. Non infectious / non-communicable disease: These diseases are those that are
not caused by infectious agents. Their causes vary, but they are not external
causes like microbes that can spread in the community. Instead, most of these
factors are internal.
Infectious diseases
These diseases are caused by viruses, some of the bacteria, some fungi, protozoan,
helminthes, Nematodes, etc. These can also be caused by some multicellular
organisms like worms of different kinds. As these can be spread easily in the
community, these are called communicable diseases.
Examples:
unicellular organisms = staphylococci (bacteria), Leishmania (protozoa), SARS (virus),
Trypanosoma (protozoa), etc.
multicellular organisms = Round worm/ Ascaris lumbricoides
Means of spread of infectious diseases:
1. Water: Microbes that grow in water may enter the drinkable water and make it
impure and unfit for drinking.
2. Air: Microbes in air like some viruses can enter the body of one person due to
coughing or sneezing by other person.
3. Physical contact
4. Vectors: Some of the protozoas or insects like female anopheles mosquito suck
blood from warm blooded organisms like humans. They bite different persons
and may act as intermediates and increase diseases.
Principles of Treatment

What are symptoms?

Symptoms refers to the changes in body caused by a diseases that are observed by a patient.
These are because of inflammation.
What are signs?
Signs are the changes in body caused by a disease and are observed by a doctor.

A disease can be cured by taking necessary precautions given by the doctor and
taking the advised medicines. The medicines and precautions are given by the doctor
after asking the symptoms from the patient and observing the signs of that disease
in the patient.

Diseases caused by viruses can be cured by taking antibiotics.

Principles of Prevention
1. Once, someone has a disease, their body functions are damaged and may never recover
completely.
2. The treatment of any disease takes time, which means that someone suffering from a disease
is likely to be forbidden for some time if we can give proper treatment.
3. Person suffering from an infectious disease should be kept in complete isolation so that the
disease cannot spread further.
4. For water borne microbes, we can prevent exposure by providing safe drinking water.
5. For vector borne disease, we can prevent exposure by providing safe and clean environment.
6. Public hygiene is the basic key for prevention of infectious diseases.
7. Proper nutrition and clean food is also must for prevention of diseases.
8. Immunization can also prevent diseases caused due infections by viruses.
Immunization
Immunization is the process of injecting a virus of less power than the original power to
make our body respond to it and learn to cope with it when the real virus enters the body.
It can help to prevent diseases. The injection of vaccines can be done to do so.
The first vaccine was penicillin and was discovered by Alexander Flemming. It was made
to help the soldiers in the second world war.

A vaccine is an injection of a virus with low power as compared to the same virus with high power to
make our immune system respond to it.
Thank you!!