What You Need To Know About Infectious Disease
How Infection Works
Encountering Microbes
Microbes have inhabited the earth for billions of years and may be the earliest life forms on the planet. They live in every conceivable ecological niche—soil, water, air, plants, rocks, and animals. They even live in extreme environments such as hot springs, deep ocean thermal vents, and Antarctic ice. Indeed microbes, by sheer mass, are the earth’s most abundant life form and are highly adaptable to external forces. How does our modern lifestyle bring us into greater contact with infectious agents—the “bad” microbes? And when we encounter them, how do they get into our bodies?
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What do you know about infectious disease?
True or False: Antibiotics work by introducing an agent that resembles a disease-causing microbe, thus stimulating the body's immune system to recognize it as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that it can more easily identify and destroy any similar, disease-causing microbes that it later encounters.
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Sorry, that’s incorrect.
The above describes how vaccines work. Antibiotics work by either killing bacteria or stopping them from reproducing, allowing the body's natural defenses to eliminate the pathogens.
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Correct!
The above describes how vaccines work. Antibiotics work by either killing bacteria or stopping them from reproducing, allowing the body's natural defenses to eliminate the pathogens.
Infectious Disease Defined
- Climate Change
The process of shifting from one prevailing state in regional or global climate to another. Climate change is typically the preferred term over “global warming” because it helps to convey that the characteristics of climate change are not limited to rising temperatures.
National Academies
Search the National Academies Press website by selecting one of these related terms.
Source Material
- Infectious Disease Movement in a Borderless World—Workshop Summary (2010)
- Microbial Evolution and Co-Adaptation: A Tribute to the Life and Scientific Legacies of Joshua Lederberg (2009)
- Global Infectious Disease Surveillance and Detection: Assessing the Challenges, Finding Solutions—Workshop Summary (2007)
- The New Science of Metagenomics: Revealing the Secrets of Our Microbial Planet (2007)
- The Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and Control: Exploring the Consequences and Opportunities—Workshop Summary (2006)
- Ending the War Metaphor: The Changing Agenda for Unraveling the Host-Microbe Relationship—Workshop Summary (2006)