Infectious diseases can greatly impair a person's well-being. And some of them are especially dangerous, entailing the risk of death. How do such pathologies arise and how do infectious diseases differ from non-infectious ones? This is discussed further.
General information
Diseases of an infectious nature are an eternal problem of mankind. Such ailments used to take the lives of many people, and each country, to one degree or another, suffered from such misfortunes. Now, thanks to the efforts of medicine, mortality for this reason has greatly decreased, but still exists.
Infectious diseases, like other pathologies, affect various organs or other components of the human body. For example, influenza and measles affect the respiratory tract, salmonellosis and dysentery affect the gastrointestinal tract, and malaria affects the blood.
Comparison
All diseases of an infectious nature are united by the fact that they develop after the introduction of microscopic pathogens into the body. These are, for example, bacteria, viruses and fungi. Moreover, each infectious agent provokes the development of one specific pathology.
Noncommunicable diseases, in turn, arise for completely different reasons. Here, a failure in the body occurs under the influence of internal factors or from external influences, but without the participation of foreign pathogens. For example, hypothyroidism is caused by a lack of hormones, and not by the action of any microorganisms.
Let us consider what other signs are that distinguish infectious diseases from non-infectious ones. So, an important indicator of ailments of the first type is their infectiousness. This means that a person suffering from a disease becomes a distributor of certain pathogens. And they strike those who were initially healthy. This is how whole epidemics develop. Meanwhile, other diseases are not adopted by people from each other, whatever the contact.
An infectious disease goes through a certain cycle in its development, consisting of several phases. Among them there is the so-called incubation period, during which a person may not even suspect that he has already acquired an infection - the ailment has not yet manifested itself. Then the first unhealthy signals, which most often cannot be called unique (for example, an overwhelmed state or a headache), make themselves felt. And only later does the disease reveal itself in full force, revealing all the symptoms characteristic of it. Ailments of other varieties proceed in their own way.
What is the difference between communicable and noncommunicable diseases apart from the above? The fact that the former cause an immune response in the body. In other words, after recovery, re-infection with the same pathogen becomes almost impossible for some time or all life. But to ailments that arise without the participation of pathogens, immunity often does not apply in any way. [twenty].
