Question

Describe how fighting an infectious disease outbreak requires the involvement of different scientific fields. Name 3 scientific fields involved and briefly define each field. Describe how each of these scientific fields is important in fighting an infectious disease outbreak. Describe specifically how coordination, communication, cooperation, and competition among these scientific fields can both enhance and prevent an effective fighting of the infectious disease outbreak.

Answer 1

Infectious diseases are becoming menace day-by-day on account of its change in behavior from recent past that had given a destructive look with advancing time. New diseases which are unknown to the world emerging and are pssing from animals to humans as well as through potential carriers. Many endemic diseases also resurges with variation in its characteristics. So, in order to combat all these, a strategic scientific method should be implemented in order to prevent the outburst of infectious diseases. The strategy implies to expand research workforce so that extensive research can be initiated to study different characteristics, forms, virulence property of microbial pathogen and also to provide directions by finding solution of it. The role of physician, scientists are most crucial as they are act as the first line of defence to directly combat the disease. The public health professionals are instrumental in protecting a larger section of people from microbial threats and in mounting effective responses in disease outbreak. The manpower, coordination, communication of these public health workers need to be strengthened in order to improve health care system. The public health workforce needs to be strengthened by educating students from health professions about the basic concepts of public health. The integration of public health and health care is required so that it will be effective to handle the surge of patients arising from disease outbreak.

The three scientific field involved in this workforce are (i) Infectious diseases physicians (ii) Epidemiologists or allied health care professionals (iii) Vaccinology.

(i) Infectious diseases physicians- Physicians specially trained in the area of infectious disease are called infectious diseases physicians that comprises an important component of workforce. They are responsible in meeting current and future challenges in detecting, treating and preventing microbial threats.

(ii) Epidemiologists or Allied health professionals- The study of the nature of disease and its incidence in a population with respect to different groups of people is related to epidemiology. The epidemiologists investigate, analyse the disease and find ways to control it in an effective manner. They will coordinate with the physicians, nurses, hospitals and laboratories.

(iii) Vaccinology- Vaccines against infectious disease is the success of modern day medical science. Vaccinology comprises the development of vaccines by extensive research, experiments, trials, etc so that its effectiveness is identified and then it will get approval by a competant authority and further it will be release in the markets. As for example, several ongoing researches has been going to successfully develop vaccine against the pandemic corona virus (Covid19).

The all three workforce components are interrelated to each other by a series of events which follows basic requirements like coordination, communication, cooperation and competition. With the outbreak of infectious disease, the front runners like the doctors, physicians, nurses, health workers should complement each other by active cooperation in order to detect by means of testing samples, then isolate in case the result is positive, and then to treat maintaining the desired protocols which is followed by post recovery observations. The regulatory authority, a research institutional body will provide guidelines about the treatment of affected patients which will be communicated to different health sectors both government and private organisations. The integration of the central apex body with different health workforce about requirements like testing equipments, kits, infrastructural facilities like isolation ward, ventilators, manpower, protective gears for infectious diseases physicians, nurses,etc needs to be strengthened by proper communication. The various findings about the infectious disease outbreak like statistical data of affected individuals, incidence of attack on different age groups of people. rate of infection, etc from the epidemiology point of view must be pass on to the apex body. The researchers those who are continously striving hard to achieve success by developing vaccine against the disease need to coordinate their works if a positive response appears. There should be a healthy competition regarding the testing frequencies of affected patients and their survival or recovery rate after detection and treatment in different health sectors. Thus the factors like coordination, communication, cooperation and competition are corelated with each other.