B9 - Communicable disease control

Question 1

What five factors does a pathogen need to cause disease?

Answer 1

1) Reservoir/environment
2) Mode of transmission - e.g. airborne, water borne, blood borne
3) Portal of entry - e.g. mouth, nose, genital tract
4) Host - e.g. chronic illness, nutrition, age, lifestyle factors, immunity
5) Infectious agent - ability to reproduce, survive, spread, cause infection etc

Question 2

What does NOIDs stand for and what does it mean?

Answer 2

Notification of Infectious diseases - a legal obligation for clinicians to notify a member of authority (i.e. Public Health England) if someone is thought to have an infectious disease.

Question 3

What is an enhanced surveillance questionnaire (ESQ)?

Answer 3

a questionnaire used to find out where people with an infectious disease have been, what they’ve been doing etc. to try and find the source of disease

Question 4

What is a weakness of enhanced surveillance questionnaires?

Answer 4

Recall bias - people can’t always remember what they’ve been doing

Question 5

List methods for controlling HCAIs

Answer 5

• hospital environmental hygiene
• isolation of cases
• hand hygiene
• use of PPE
• safe use and disposal of sharps
• aseptic techniques

Question 6

What is global health?

Answer 6

improving health world-wide and achieving world-wide equity in healthcare.
promotes interdisciplinary collaboration. takes into account wider determinants of health (e.g. housing, education)

Question 7

Name four strategies/solutions for improving global health

Answer 7

1) regulation of quality of imported goods (food, medicine etc.)
2) Timely access to information about global spread of infectious diseases
3) Sufficient vaccine and drug supplies in a pandemic
4) Ensuring sufficient force of well-trained health professionals

Question 8

What are some of the issues surrounding global health?

Answer 8

• security
• governance
• common health issues - what about the more obscure ones?
• ethics - solutions that work in one country may not work in another (e.g. due to traditions)

Question 9

Name models for International health and describe them

Answer 9

1) Development aid
- creates dependence
- have donors and recipeints
- motivation is charity, self-interest
- resources from high income countries
2) International cooperation
- independent relationships between member states
- motivation is for mutual benefits
- pooled resources
3) Global solidarity
- interdependence
- involves members of a global society
- shared responsibility
- shared resources based on universal rights

Question 10

What are some of the expectations of global health?

Answer 10

• culturally determined practice
• knowledge of tropical diseases and emerging global infections
• travel clinic
• wider determinants of health in a global sense
• ability to address health inequalities