Stay away from these 5 Diseases :: Swine Flu
The swine flu outbreaks cropping up in several countries now are nothing — so far — compared to historical flu outbreaks. But with more people on the planet, and more of them huddled in cities and more of them traveling so easily, the potential for pandemic is not lost on health officials.
Flu history is frightening: The 1918 influenza pandemic swept the world within months, killing an estimated 50 million people — more than any other illness in recorded history for the short time frame involved.
One-fifth of the world's population was infected, and it struck more than 25 percent of U.S. residents. Unlike some flu strains that mainly kill the elderly, children, and those with compromised immune systems, the 1918 strain hit young adults hard. In one year, the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years.
Today, governments are more prepared, scientifically and logistically, to handle flu outbreaks. Still, there is no vaccine for swine flu, and it could take months, or more, to develop one.
Stay away from these 5 Diseases :: Bubonic plague
Nothing beats the 14-century Black Death (also called Bubonic Plague) for sheer global impact of a single disease outbreak and bringing civilization to its knees. It is the epitome of plague. Corpses piled in the streets from Europe to Egypt and across Asia. Some 75 million died — at a time when there were only about 360 million to start with. Death came in a matter of days, and it was excruciatingly painful.
Plague is a bacterial disease caused by Yersinia pestis. It is carried by rodents and even cats, but becomes most deadly to us when transmitted between people, as became the case in the 1300s. Symptoms include fever, chills, weakness, and swollen and painful lymph nodes. Even today, if not treated, death ensues.
The plague of the 14th-century resulted after the rare bacteria had been dormant for centuries in Asia's Gobi desert. After awaking in the 1320s, it piggybacked along trade routes from China, through the rest of Asia and eventually to Italy in 1347, then later to Russia.
It took centuries for some societies to recover, as some of the survivors mistrusted local authorities and in some cases even God, under whose wrath they presumably had suffered.
Stay away from these 5 Diseases :: HIV AIDS
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, originated from chimps and other primates and is thought to have first infected humans at least a century ago. It destroys the immune system, opening the door to a host of deadly infections or cancers. Example: Tuberculosis (TB) kills nearly a quarter of a million people living with HIV each year.
At the end of 2007, an estimated 33 million people had HIV, including about 2.7 million new cases for the year, and about 2 million died (including 270,000 children) during the year. Two-thirds of HIV infections are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Recently, researchers found that HIV was in the United States as early as 1969, much earlier than had been thought.
Stay away from these 5 Diseases :: Ebola
Ebola is a widespread threat to gorillas and chimps in Central Africa, and may have spread to humans from people who ate infected animals. It is now transmittable human-to-human, by contact with the blood or body fluids of an infected person, and it has killed a few hundred people in each of several outbreaks going back to the mid-1970s.
The awful symptoms: sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat, often followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding. It's deadly somewhere between 25 and 90 percent of the time depending on the strain.
Ebola may be carried by bats, researchers think, because when bats are infected with it, they don't die.
Stay away from these 10 Diseases :: Polio, Anthrax
Studying wild animal populations can be difficult. But scientists have speculated that chimps at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania contracted polio from humans, according to Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Robert Koch-Institute and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
There have also been concerns that gorillas contracted yaws, a disease related to syphilis that is not sexually transmitted, from humans, Leendertz added.
Gorillas and chimpanzees in West Africa have been killed by outbreaks of anthrax, which might have originated from cattle herded by humans, although Leendertz said these events may have been caused by anthrax existing naturally in the forests.
Tag :
disease
0 Komentar untuk "Stay away from these 5 Diseases"