What You Need To Know About Infectious Disease
Prevention & Treatment
International Cooperation
National borders are trivial impediments to infectious disease threats. In the highly interconnected and readily traversed global village of our time, one nation’s problem soon becomes every nation’s problem. Therefore, strategies must be implemented worldwide, not just nationally, in order to have a true impact.
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What do you know about infectious disease?
True or False: Antibiotics work by introducing an agent that resembles a disease-causing microbe, thus stimulating the body's immune system to recognize it as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that it can more easily identify and destroy any similar, disease-causing microbes that it later encounters.
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Sorry, that’s incorrect.
The above describes how vaccines work. Antibiotics work by either killing bacteria or stopping them from reproducing, allowing the body's natural defenses to eliminate the pathogens.
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Correct!
The above describes how vaccines work. Antibiotics work by either killing bacteria or stopping them from reproducing, allowing the body's natural defenses to eliminate the pathogens.
Infectious Disease Defined
- Sterilization
The process of destroying all forms of life, including infectious agents, from a surface, fluid, or biological medium with the use of heat, chemicals, irradiation, high pressure, filtration, or some combination of these methods.
National Academies
Search the National Academies Press website by selecting one of these related terms.
Source Material
- Infectious Disease Movement in a Borderless World—Workshop Summary (2010)
- Global Issues in Water, Sanitation, and Health—Workshop Summary (2009)
- Sustaining Global Surveillance and Response to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases (2009)
- The U.S. Commitment to Global Health: Recommendations for the Public and Private Sectors (2009)
- Achieving Sustainable Global Capacity for Surveillance and Response to Emerging Diseases of Zoonotic Origin—Workshop Summary (2008)
- Global Infectious Disease Surveillance and Detection: Assessing the Challenges, Finding Solutions—Workshop Summary (2007)
- Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance (2004)
