Question

Topic: Person-to-person viral diseases

• Provide an example of a pathogen in the category.
• Provide the genus and species of the pathogen, along with the name of the illness the pathogen causes in humans.
• From an epidemiological perspective, why is this pathogen a human health threat?

Answer 1

Viral diseases which are transmitted from person to person is called contagious diseases. But all viral diseases are not contagious. Common examples of contagious viral diseases are common cold, flu, HIV and herpes.

One of the contagious virus is 'Coronavirus'. The species name of this virus is 'severe acute respiratory syndrome related coronavirus (SARS-CoV)' and it's genus is 'betacoronavirus' and subgenus called sarbecoronavirus. This virus causes 'Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)' disease in human.

From an epidemiological perspective, we can say that both immuno suppressed and normal population appear susceptible to this novel coronavirus. These respiratory viruses is continue to pose a pandemic threat to human health. Initially the viruses resulted in a cluster of viral pneumonia cases but later it caused an elevated number of reported infections in humans globally. The mortality from this viruses are mainly due to acute respiratory distress syndrome which may be associated with comorbidities and multiple organ failure leads to death. In addition, there is no specific vaccine or medicines are available against this virus causing disease. Only symptomatic treatments and isolation of infected person is provided inorder treat this disease.