Question

1. List and define any five epidemiologic measures used to quantify features of disease transmission among populations and/or individual organisms, themselves. You may give an example of how to use the measure if it is too difficult to define on its own.

2. Discuss the process of clonal selection. Select an auto-immune disorder and discuss how that auto-immune disorder causes disease, what cell(s) are involved in the auto-immune response (specific to the disease you have selected), and how the clonal selection process has or has not been impacted.

Please answer these questions and try to cover the whole question in your answer. thank you!

Answer 1

There might be a host of factors (the determinants, occurrence, distribution, and control) influencing the transmission of disease and to epidemologically quantify them has various dimensions to look at the nature of the asked question. I, however will try to answer it in the way I understood.

First answer: Epidemiological factors are:

1. Pathogenicity: Ability of a microorganism to cause a disease

2. Virulence: It is the degree of pathogenecity. Sub factors: Toxins, Adhesive factors, biofims, antiphagocytic factors

3. Route of acquisition of a disease: eg: Contact based, vector based

4. Infectivity: Sequence of acquisition followed by colonization and multiplication of a disease

4. Host factors: The ability of a microorganism to produce disease in the host is a function of the inter activity between the virulence of the microorganism and host factors.

Second answer:

An image from wikipedia to understand clonal selection

Process: Take Rheumatoid Arthritis for example. The cell that gets affected is B Lymphocyte

1. Each B cell makes a different antibody and displays it on its cell surface

2. The cell makes a specific antiibody that binds a specific antigenic determinant that is extraacted from the pathogen

3. This stimulates the cells to divide and the growth of this specific B cell population takes place

4. This results in cloning. Memory cells and Plasma cells are seperated. Plasma cells are effector cells which are same as parent cells and Memory cells are used in perpetuating the clone. They divide at low rate.

5. Activated T cells are cloned and destroy the infected cells in the body

6. Memort T cells are produced and are activated if this antigen is encountered again.

This procedure is common for all the clonal selection

-------------

Please like this if it helped!