Infectious Diseases Flashcards
How do infectious diseases affect local and global populations?
- locally they affect communities by straining healthcare systems and impacting vulnerable populations
- globally - infectious diseases can spread across borders through travel and trade, leading to pandemics like COVID-19
What do effective public strategies require to prevent and manage outbreaks?
local disease control measures (e.g. vaccination, sanitation) and global cooperation (e.g. WHO guidelines, surveillance, and response efforts)
What are emerging infections?
newly identified diseases/infections that have recently increased in incidence or geographic spread
What can emerging infections arise from?
zoonotic transmission, genetic mutations or environmental changes
Give examples of emerging infections
COVID-19, SARS, MERS and Ebola
What are re-emerging infections?
diseases that were previously under control but have resurfaced due to antibiotic resistance, reduced vaccination rates or changes in human behaviour and climate
Give examples of re-emerging infections
Tuberculosis, measles, dengue and cholera
How do emerging and re-emerging diseases pose significant challenges?
- increase disease burden
- straining healthcare resources
- require rapid surveillance and vaccination programmes
What is fatality?
the potential to cause serious disease in humans
What is infectivity?
the potential to spread quickly between humans, to result in an international epidemic
When does antibiotic resistance occur?
when bacteria evolve and become resistant to antibiotics, making infections harder to treat
What is the public health impact of antibiotic resistance?
- increased disease burden – common infections (e.g. pneumonia, tuberculosis) become harder to cure
- strained healthcare systems – longer hospital stays and more expensive treatments
- global threat – resistant bacteria can spread across borders, leading to outbreaks and pandemics
- reduced effectiveness of medical procedures – surgeries, chemotherapy, and organ transplants rely on effective antibiotics to prevent infections
What are public health strategies for antibiotic resistance?
- antibiotic stewardship – promoting responsible antibiotic use in healthcare and agriculture
- surveillance and research – monitoring resistance patterns and developing new antibiotics
- infection prevention – strengthening hygiene, vaccination, and public awareness campaigns
What is infectious diseases epidemiology?
the study of the incidence and spread of infectious diseases in populations over time
What are purposes of infectious diseases epidemiology?
- identification of causes of new, emerging infections e.g. COVID-19
- surveillance of infectious disease
- identification of source of outbreaks
- studies of routes of transmission and natural history of infections
- identification and evaluation of new (and existing) risk factors and interventions
What is surveillance (WHO definition)?
the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data needed for the planning, implementation and evaluation of public health practice
What are the 8 kinds of surveillance?
- passive
- active
- sentinel
- seroprevalence
- syndromic/scanning
- genomic
- rumour
- national notifiable disease
What is passive surveillance?
the regulation ongoing reporting of a set of known diseases and conditions by health facilities in a designated region; covers a pre-defined geographical region, with a set of developed protocols and lab-tests which lowers costs
What happens in active surveillance?
specific lab tests are performed, medical records are reviewed, or healthcare providers in health facilities are interviewed with the purpose of identifying a specific disease or condition
What does active surveillance require?
prior knowledge of detection methods or known symptoms; typically resource intensive
What are the 7 main reasons for performing surveillance?
- to identify the presence of a disease problem early
- to establish the characteristics of the disease and methods to detect
- to measure the at-risk groups (and size of these groups) in a population
- to determine high-risk settings and environments
- to prioritise measures for disease control and prevention
- to evaluate whether disease control programmes are working
- to identify priorities for research and implementation
What are characteristics of a good surveillance system?
- easy to operationalise and implement
- real-time
- representative (geography, population segments)
- sufficiently sensitive and specific (does not miss out on true signals of outbreaks, but does not unnecessarily sound false alarms)
What are key considerations of a public health implementation?
- scientifically credible and meaningful
- financially sustainable
- operational scalable
- socially acceptable
- politically viable
What does sentinel surveillance involve?
a pre-defined list of (healthcare) providers to provide samples or clinical data over a pre-defined period of time
