Shingles What are shingles you might ask? Shingle are a reactivation of the chickenpox virus in the body, causing a painful rash. Herpes zoster is another name for the virus. Shingles was thought to be a fairly painless and harmless virus until the 1950s, when the medical community first recognized the severity of the symptoms of shingles.
Smallpox is a contagious disease caused by the variola virus. The variola virus is the causative agent of smallpox. It can infect humans due to its ability to bypass the human’s immune responses and complement activation. Smallpox gets its name from pus-filled blisters that form during the illness. It was one of the world’s most devastating diseases known to humanity. Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300-500 million deaths during the 20th century.
Although Chickenpox outbreaks are scarce, during the 1800s- 1900s Chickenpox outbreaks were a prevailing issue. “….an extremely contagious viral disease (Funk/Wagnalls 1)....which most people have only once, is rarely a dangerous disease in otherwise healthy children. It can be life-threatening (Funk/ Wagnalls 1)...” Although Chickenpox killed and infected hundreds of people, many beneficial things came out of it Such as the vaccine, known as Gamma Globulin, which can help people suffering from Chickenpox and Hepatitis. Gamma Globulin wasn’t introduced until the late 1900s- years after some of the biggest Chicken Pox epidemics were over.
Although shingles is related to chicken pox, the two ailments are quite different. Shingles attacks only half of the body, but the rash that forms is severely debilitating. The pain is likened to searing hot needles being poked into the skin, non-stop, for weeks on end. Once the virus runs its course, typically two to four weeks, the
Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: the great smallpox epidemic of 1775-82, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). Pages, ix, 384, index, bibliography. Review by Samantha Pilcher. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the author of Pox Americana.
The history of infectious diseases in America predates the establishment of the United States. Colonial children were afflicted by many epidemic contagious diseases, and a number of very graphic descriptions have been recorded.1 As research and medical advances have increased, more vaccinations have been developed to prevent and eliminate some of these once deadly diseases. The pace of progress regarding infectious diseases of children accelerated during the 18th Century, particularly with respect to prevention of smallpox by inoculation or variolation. Smallpox was an almost inevitable illness of childhood and was one of the most common causes of death because of its high mortality rate. It was reported, for example, to kill 10% of Swedish
How has the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793 change history? An appalling contagious outbreak impacted the colossal city of America and its country’s capital. In the summer of 1793 the weather was brutally humid and mild. Therefore, this infectious disease has initiated in August and is known to be terminated approximately few months later in November. This disease has commenced by mosquitoes and caused a massive amount of deaths. Not only has this epidemic dispatched numerous people it made them suffer to the point where it was unbearable to handle.
This is an extremely painful disease that can be described as a severe version of chickenpox and has a high mortality rate in adults. It should also be noted that there has been a “28.5% increase in shingles between 2000 and 2001 in people 20-69 years old,” [12]. These are people that would not have had access to the chickenpox vaccine, which was only beginning to become widespread around 1995 when a 20 year old (in 2012) would have been around 3 or 4. They would have most likely caught the chickenpox virus already. This shows that before the
Whooping Cough known as pertussis. It is an infection in the respiratory system that’s caused by the bacterium Bordetella (Kids Health, 1995-2015). In 1906, Octave Gengou and Jules Bordet discovered the bacteria Bordetella pertussis, and found a vaccine to stop the disease before it actually occurred. The first outbreak took place in the 16th century. Before they were able to discover such vaccine to cure whooping cough, well over 250,000 cases of whooping cough per year in the U.S., with 9,000 reported deaths (Medicine Net, 1996-2015).
Disease, one of the major killers of the 18th and 19th Century. Hundreds of thousands across the world have died from numerous infectious disease that spread as fast as wildfire. One of the most notorious examples of a plague that spread and wiped out a third of europe was the Bubonic Plague or its common name, the Black Death. How do we keep diseases such as the Bubonic Plague from wiping out the developing new world known as America? What disease could cause cause such panic and uproar that hundreds of citizens to flee from their city to avoid it?
The plague occured in the United States in 1900(“Plague”1). In the United States Bubonic formed all over the country and people were scared and confused There were rats that sneak onto the steamboats and get people affected. New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Nevada are impacted today by the plague(“CDC”). The plague occurs in the wild. If untreated, people still can die from the plague, which in the United States occurs in the wild(“Plague Occurs”).
Human monkeypox is a viral zoonotic disease caused by the monkeypox virus (MPXV), a member of the genus Orthopoxvirus (family Poxviridae, subfamily Chordopoxvirinae), that occurs mostly in the rain forests of central and western Africa. People living in or near the forested areas may have indirect or low-level exposure, possibly leading to subclinical infection. However, the disease recently emerged in the United States in imported wild rodents from Africa. Monkeypox has a clinical presentation very similar to that of ordinary forms of smallpox, including flulike symptoms, fever, malaise, back pain, headache, and characteristic rash. Given this clinical spectrum, differential diagnosis to rule out smallpox is very important. Primary transmission believed to occur through direct contact with
Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by the Variola major virus, though a much milder form of the disease was also caused by the Variola minor virus. The disease spreads when healthy individuals inhale droplets of saliva from infected
The bacterium uses the blood as transportation machine that helps it to spread all over the body. Treponema pallidum progresses through four stages, and each stage has different symptoms. The first stage or the primary stage is the stage at which sores appear in the position where the bacterium entered the body. After the entrance of the bacterium to the body, it goes to the nearby lymph node within hours then it continues to spread in the body. The appearance of that sores usually happens in 2 to 10 weeks following exposure, and chancres, another name for the sores, are red, oval, and painless.
In the US, up to 64 million people are infected with influenza every year with 51 thousand cases resulting in death. (Treanor) The fever, runny nose, and body aches keep Americans curled up in their bed, miserable, all week. You try to do everything you can to isolate yourself from the virus, but somehow it always finds a way to get you sick. It seems like it is the same routine every year of taking days off work or completing make up work for school. Records of influenza symptoms date back thousands of years, with many massive outbreaks such as the 1918 Spanish flu and the 2009 Swine flu pandemic along the way. Scientists have been searching for a cure for years, but even through modern medicine, the fight against influenza continues. The structure, replication process, and limitations on modern medicine are just a few factors that keep influenza spreading across the world every year.