What is the meaning of causative disease?
There can be multiple causes for diseases which can either be immediate or contributory. Immediate causes can further be divided into infectious and non-infectious causes.
Diseases caused by microbes are grouped under the category of infectious diseases. Infectious agents include viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoan, and even worms.
What is causative disease?
Any disease can have single or multiple causes. These causes can be grouped under two categories immediate causes and contributory causes. The infecting organism comes under the category of immediate cause and other factors like an unhygienic environment etc come under contributory causes.
Immediate causes can be further subdivided into two classes infectious causes and non-infectious causes.
Infectious causes: It includes microbes as causatives of diseases. These diseases are known as infectious diseases. They can be easily spread in the community.
Non-infectious cause: It includes internal factors like genetic makeup etc as causatives. No external agents are involved in this. They do not spread e.g. cancer.
What is an Infectious disease?
Infectious diseases are a disease caused by a microorganism. Causative agents of infectious diseases include viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoans, and some multicellular organisms like worms. Knowledge of infectious agents is very important as it helps us to decide the kind of treatment needed to eradicate the diseases.
How Disease is caused by viruses?
Viruses multiply quickly inside the host cell. They occupy the host machinery and use their resources to multiply and divide and in this way, they spread diseases. Different viruses have different processes i.e. all viruses do not share similar processes. Some diseases caused by viruses are the common cold, AIDS, smallpox, influenza, swine flu diseases
How Disease is caused by bacteria?
Bacteria are a class of microorganism that is very closely related to each other. They divide rapidly and spread a variety of diseases. Antibiotics are the class of drugs generally used to treat bacterial diseases. Antibiotics interfere with bacterial biochemical pathways and block their proliferation e.g. Penicillin a common antibiotic hinders cell wall formation in bacteria and thus helps kill bacteria.
Antibiotics are not useful against viruses as viruses don’t use any pathways for cell wall formation.
Some bacterial-causing infections include typhoid, tuberculosis, anthrax, tetanus, etc
Diseases caused by fungi: skin infections
Diseases caused by protozoan: malaria, kala-azar, trypanosome, etc
Diseases caused by worms: elephantiasis etc