The Infectious Nature Of The Disease

Dr. Gawande 's demonstration of diligence was expressed from his study of the 19th century Vienna on the importance of hand-washing, the care taken to save the wounded in Afghanistan and the drive to eliminate the Poliovirus in India. The task of washing your hands may seem so tedious to some but Dr. Gawande explained the significance in patient care as a prevention of becoming carriers of bacteria. In 1847, a Viennese obstetrician, Ignac Semmelweis was one of the first to realize that doctors were the ones transmitting Steptococcus to mothers and babies during childbirth. This led to what was called "childbed fever" also known as puerperal fever which was a leading cause for maternal death during childbirth. Dr. Semmelweis

Mr. Gawande starts his literature on washing hands. He introduces two friends a microbiologist and an infectious disease specialist. Both work hard and diligently against the spread of diseases just like Semmelweis who is mentioned in the chapter. Something I learned, that not many realize, is that each year two million people acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Mainly because the clinicians only wash their hands one-third to one-half as many times as they should. Semmelweis, mentioned earlier, concluded in 1847 that doctors themselves were to blame for childbed fever, which was the leading cause of

It was Robert Koch who linked the germ theory and disease with actual proof in 1878, a few years after the Second Public Health Act had been passed, but many people believed that he was right before he proved it. One of the most important reasons was that in 1867, the vote was given to all male householders. Before, it had just been the rich that had voted. The rich lived in the towns, owned houses where disease was kept to a minimum and lived, on average, twenty-five years longer than the urban working class. The Public Health Act was extremely successful and by the end of the century almost all towns had hygienic sewers and water systems.

Dr. John Snow was known as an intelligent physician who had a background with anesthesia advancements. He believed that cholera was a waterborne disease and that it was contaminated by the sewage. Snow’s goal was to convince others about the issue and stop it from spreading. His theory about the intestinal disease, in which was published in 1849 in an article, was laughed at and many doctors believed that his idea was “wrong” and they continued to believe that it was airborne. He wanted to prove many wrong and begin to further research and experiment the disease.

Although most disease struck the poorest, the upper class was not fully immune. Because people wanted to move to cities to make their lives better, they were forced to live around these diseases without proper means for prevention, protection, and recovery. Once contracting the disease, they would either die within hours or suffer from uncontrollable diarrhea and pain. In addition, scientific knowledge on disease was not as developed as it fortunately is today. Doctors had not yet learned the concept of a germ theory and instead associated the disease with the “bad air” that surrounded toxic, polluted cities. This “bad air” was known as miasa and was incorrectly used to explain the spread of cholera in major cities during the mid 1800s. After studies and research, doctors noticed that there was a heavy concentration of miasmata near certain rivers, but they still connected it to a lack of air quality in bustling cities such as Manchester, London, and Paris. Although air pollution and coal emissions did play a role in certain illnesses, they were not the main cause for diseases such as cholera. Poor ventilation, dirty homes, malnourishment, and no access to clean water made people easily susceptible to a ruthless disease like cholera. Moreover, causes of cholera were investigated more thoroughly after John Snow’s theory claimed that cholera was spread through the water John Snow was an English physician who is today considered one of the fathers of modern epidemiology, the branch of medicine that deals with the distribution and control of diseases relating to health. Finally, doctors could see cholera in a new light and were able to find better means of protection and prevention for its victims. Today, doctors recognize the germ theory of disease which states that some diseases are caused by microorganisms, and not just by “bad

Typhus is a disease caused by a genus of bacteria known as Rickettsia, which has been around since the late fifteenth century. Up until the twentieth century, it had impacted the world in both a negative and positive way. It killed off a lot of civilians and troops, but has also helped places advance more in medicine. Historically, typhus did a lot of damage to Europe. Not only was Europe as a whole damaged, but the population living within Europe was damaged as well. Finding out you have typhus must be the most awful feeling in the world. Especially because it’s essentially life or death, if it’s not treated on time or correctly.

Throughout Sherwin B. Nuland’s book The Doctor’s Plague, Nuland discusses the devastating epidemic of childbed fever. One out of six women to give birth in the First Division at the Krankenhaus hospital in Vienna, Austria was to succumb to this supposed mystery illness. Childbed fever was a harrowing complication not only at the Krankenhaus in Vienna, but all over other parts of Europe as well. Nuland takes us through this occasion and draws his attention to Ignac Semmelweis, an assistant physician at Krankenhaus who unearths the real reason behind the incredibly high mortality rate of expectant new to be mothers. Semmelweis traces the origin of this mysterious illness to the delivering doctors and students of the hospital in the First division

In a controlled experiment he found that having obstetricians wash their hands in a chlorinated-lime solution dropped maternal mortality from 10% to below 1%. He, too, was derided by the medical establishment and, for him personally, the result was tragic. Semmelweis lost his hospital position, was forced to move from Vienna to Budapest and when he wrote angry letters accusing European obstetricians of being irresponsible murderers, he was said to be insane (even his wife agreed.) No doubt he was unbalanced to a degree and in 1865 the forty-seven year old physician was forcibly committed to an asylum. He died there two weeks later, possibly as a result of injuries sustained when beaten by guards, and it wasn’t for nearly another three decades as a result of Pasteur’s work that Ignatz Semmelweis’s findings gained acceptance. In our time, reference sometimes is made to a so-called “Semmelweis Reflex” or “Semmelweiss Effect” which refers to a tendency to automatically reject new knowledge that contradicts established beliefs – in effect, “zombie

The hygiene movement helped in the avoidance of communicable diseases, diseases for example cholera, tuberculosis and water illnesses in large part by modifying the people surroundings. In the 1850s, John Snow assisted in recognized the importance in data collection and documentation. His actions terminated an outbreak of cholera in a district of London. Using the same methodology Ignaz Semmelweis, applied it to restraint fever of childbirth a major source of maternal mortality. The reason that this was happening was that after physicians worked on the death bodies, usually they did not wash their and delivered babies and contaminating both, the mother and the baby.

In my fifteen years of living, I have been vaccinated numerous times for all types of diseases; Polio, Measles, Mumps, and a few others. Immunization

The improvement of medicine over the course of the human successes gave great convenience to the people of today. Science has cured and prevented many illnesses from occurring and is on its way to cure some of the most dreadful and harmful illnesses. As the world modernizes due to the industrialization, so does the ways of medicine. Some cures are approached by chance, some, through intense, scientific measures.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has recently noted several model antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains with redesigned capabilities in pathogenesis, transmission and resistance. These several strains, Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter species, have been given the acronym-based title of the ESKAPE Pathogens. These strains of bacteria compromise one of the biggest threats faced by physicians today not because of the infectious and devastating illnesses they lead to, but because of their ability to resist antibiotics in the healthcare setting. Failure for industries, academia and government to cooperate and develop research/development operations has left healthcare providers one-step behind in the fight against these new brands of infectious diseases. A lack of research/development operations has left the healthcare industry with antiquated antibiotics no longer capable of targeting and eradicating these microorganisms in human systems.

In 1864, a medical officer found that at any given time, one in three cases of sickness within the British army was caused by a sexually transmitted disease, likely contracted from prostitutes. This led to the enactment of the euphemistic ‘Contagious Disease Act’ which allowed any woman perceived by police to be a prostitute, within a ten-mile radius of a garrison town, to be forcibly detained and examined for evidence of a venereal disease. If such a woman were found guilty; she could be locked in hospital for up to a year to receive compulsory vaginal examinations as well as lessons in morality because she was considered a ‘fallen’ woman. This approach would be sexist and cruel if enacted today but at the time it seemed to be the clearest and least jarring method of managing sexually transmitted diseases, by sterilising the environment in which they fester. Sexually transmitted diseases were such an important public health issue for Britain that

Hans Selye, MD was born in Vienna and studied medicine in Prague, Paris, and Rome. His interest in the body’s physiological response to illness and disease started in medical school, 1925. The curriculum included viewing patients in the early stages of a variety of infectious diseases. The professor noted that they looked and felt ill, had digestive problems and depression. He described the symptoms as “nonspecific” and useless in attempting to determine the germs responsible. (Hansen,

Throughout history until the 19th century, infectious diseases, epidemics, and pandemics were thought to be the manifestation of supernatural forces and little to nothing was truly effective in preventing or treating these devastating threats to society. It was only during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment that the long-accepted realities of society were questioned and research was conducted based on science and reason that would forever change the world we live in (Kumar, 2007). The science of epidemiology was founded by John Snow’s identification of polluted public water well as the source of an 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Shortly thereafter germ theory began to emerge and science took off.