The Epidemic Of Disease On The Continent Of Africa

In the United States, there are the privileges of incredible doctors, medicine, insurance, and many other resources that help the society stay healthy and prevent disease. Disease and sickness can be detrimental to a society. For example, something as simple as getting a flu shot saves lives around the world every year. In the Congo, vaccines are lucky to come by and are extremely valued. When people in a society are prone to disease, this affects how effective the society can be as a whole. Furthermore, this starts from the youth. The youth in the Congo are deprived of basic health requirements, causing the Congo to be an ineffective and war torn society.

In this episode of “Guns, Germs & Steel”, the audience learns about the European colonization of Africa. Each continent has African and European influence still today, and this episode walks us through how the world sees present-day Africa based on its history. To me, one of the more interesting pieces of Africa’s colonization was how disease affected the people involved.

The Black Death made a portion of the number of inhabitants in Afro-Eurasia be wiped out inside weeks once it had spread crosswise over Afro-Eurasia. This prompted the general population requiring legal advisors, in light of the fact that there was so much land that should have been settled. Since all the legacy from the dead went to the resistant relatives, they instantly wound up noticeably wealthier. This implied regularly there was no working power to gather harvests or watch out for animals.

The world as a whole should be mortified by what is happening in Sub-Saharan Africa. In places like Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho poverty, crime and systematic corruption are the tinder for the fire that is the HIV epidemic in Africa.

The bubonic plague, or Black Death, was a deadly disease that swept throughout the Afro-Eurasion landmass. Carried by black rats, the bacillus, Yersinia pestis, wiped out two-thirds of the population in some areas of China, Muslim towns, Southwest Asia, parts of the European population, as well as parts of North Africa. The ramifications of the plague varied from place to place, but it commonly effected areas of Afro- Eurasia socially, politically and economically negatively.

The Black Death was one of the biggest epidemics in the world that caused more than 75 to 200 millions deaths world wide. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30 to 60% of Europe's total population. This may have reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million in the 14th century. What is the Plague and how is it caused? The Bubonic plague is a caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis that is commonly found in rats that carry the bacteria. When the rats dies fleas come to feed on the rats then jump onto humans infecting them with this disease. The human effected will start to develop buboes, large egg or apple sized tumor looking sacs that ooze pus and blood when cut open. It is said that the Black Death takes up to three stages

The earth has been evolving for billions of years, growing in population as well as

about 207 million cases of malaria and 80% of cases of malaria in the world are in Africa. There

Discovered in 1909 by Carlos Chagas, Chagas disease, or American trypanosomiasis, affects an estimated 8 million individuals annually according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of individuals affected by this disease annually makes it a significant, yet preventable, problem. As a chronic parasitic infection, the disease is transmitted by insects and most commonly found in impoverished regions of Latin America, as well as the rest of the Americas. The purpose of this report is to explain the biology of this disease as well as its epidemiology and prevention strategies.

Have you ever wondered why diseases like Ebola come from Africa? It’s because Africa has limited filtered and clean water. Why? I guess you could blame the Sahara Desert or global warming. The Sahara is very dry at some seasons, and has wet winds called monsoons. Global warming on the other hand, is warming the planet, little by little, decreasing the amount of natural ice in places like Antarctica, or basically heating up the planet. Yet the US or other countries who do have enough money to supply clean, filtered water for their citizens, don’t have the decency to help them. But it’s not always the government’s fault; some citizens somehow don’t have the money to support dying people, but they do happen to have the money to buy class A drugs

Malaria or other similar diseases like malaria has been recognized and encountered by humans for more than 4,000 years. Malaria is caused by the genus Plasmodium parasites, which enter the human body and are transmitted to people through the bite of a mosquito infected with the parasite (Q&A, Malaria). Once the parasite enters the human body, the parasites multiply in the liver and then infect red blood cells. The malaria parasite was first discovered on November 6, 1880, by a French army surgeon named Charles Louis Al phonse Laveran. While stationed in

East African Trypanosomiasis, better known as the sleeping sickness, is when a tsetse fly bites you and you get infected. The bite is painful and will turn into a red sore or in more serious cases a chancre. Tsetse flies feed on animals then they go and bite humans causing the disease. Some symptoms are fever, extreme fatigue, joint pains and headaches. Some people will experience personality changes and neurological problems. The symptoms will start to occur within one to three weeks prior to the bite. If this disease isn't treated death will occur within months. The fly bites during daylight and usually in woodland and savannah areas. People who live in rural areas have a much higher risk of getting bite by a tsetse fly. There is no way to prevent the bite. However there is treatment. This is a global issue in South Sudan, Africa. The sleeping sickness was first reported in South Sudan in 1908. East African Trypanosomiasis has been an issue for the past century.

Africa, and what they can learn from other countries to try to control the rapid spread of

About 3.3 billion people, that is about half of the world’s population are at risk of contracting malaria (figure 1). Every year there are 250 million cases of malaria, and nearly 1 million deaths. That amounts to 2,732 deaths per day. Out of those million people that die every year, 800,000 of them are African children under the age of 5. To control malaria three actions need to be taken: insecticides need to be used to decrease the vector population, people have to be educated as to how to prevent the vector from reproducing, and anti-malarial drugs need to be distributed. To understand the vector and what the vector is, scientists had to first discover what the parasite was and how it worked. It was not until the year 1880 that French Physician Charles Laveran discovered that Malaria was caused by a protozoan in the genus Plasmodium (Malaria, 2013)

Of the many diseases spread by insects, none are actually caused by the insects themselves but by other organisms passed on when they feed or bite. Insects are capable of spreading diseases caused by many different types of microorganisms including bacteria, viruses, protozoan and others. Mosquitoes have earned the title of "the most deadly creature on earth." This is due to the fact that they spread serious epidemic diseases such as Malaria, Yellow Fever, African Sleeping Sickness, and West Nile Virus.