4-7 pages long, double spaced and not including references page in APA format.
Select one of the communicable diseases below:
Tuberculosis
Malaria
Zika
Ebola
Hepatitis B
Dengue
Genital Chlamydia
In your essay, you are to discuss the nature and key public health aspects of the disease that you have chosen. You should explain the burden that it represents for humans, how humans come to be infected, biological aspects of the infecting agent that are important in transmission and disease, and some of the most important recommended public health control measures to reduce the burden of disease. Finally, you should propose one or more recommendations to improve current prevention and control strategies for the disease.
For some of the choices presented above, you will probably want to focus on the situation and issues presented by the disease in an international context. For others, a U.S. focus is more appropriate. While in general epidemiologic data are more available for U.S. populations than for populations outside the United States, you should be able to find adequate information for your paper on any of the conditions listed above. You should explicitly state the population focus of your essay; in other words, is your paper about Disease X in the United States, about Disease X globally, or about Disease X in a particular country.
You are expected to obtain your information from reliable sources such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, World Health Organization, or other scientifically reputable organizations; use of more than one source for the paper is required. Try to minimize use of secondary and lay media sources
ANSWER THE QUESTIONS BELOW IN THE PAPER::::
1. Describe the agent and its key characteristics. What is the agent? What are key characteristics of the agent that influence its transmission, virulence, and the ease/difficulty of prevention and control? Is there a vector or intermediate host? If so, what are the characteristics of the vector or intermediate host?
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2. Describe the disease. What are its major manifestations? How does the disease affect individuals who get it? You should describe the symptoms and signs of the disease so that an educated lay person would have a good sense of what the disease is and how it affects people after reading your description. If there are important complications or long-term sequelae of this communicable disease, these should be included in your description. Who is the disease most likely to affect (are there differences according to gender, age, racial/ethnic group, or other host characteristics?). Where is it common? Have there been important trends in occurrence over time? Are asymptomatic cases common and how do they affect the epidemiology and control of the disease? Is long- term/chronic infection an issue with this disease? If so, how does this affect the prospects for prevention and control?
3. Describe the epidemiology of the disease and mode of transmission. Discuss how the disease is transmitted in the population(s) that you selected and the impact of the disease. How is the disease transmitted, in general, and the most important modes of transmission in your chosen settings? What is the burden of this disease upon your population—how much of the disease is there (incidence/prevalence)? How much death and disability does the disease cause in your population? What is the case fatality rate? What are the economic or other costs? Are there groups or types of people that are more affected by this problem than others? Why are these group at a higher risk? How do people acquire the disease? In other words, how is it transmitted to humans? How likely is it that an exposed person will be infected? Are there factors that make transmission or less likely? Who is at particular risk? Try to relate the biological characteristics of agent and host to the epidemiology and transmission of the disease.
4. Discuss current recommendations for prevention and control of your selected disease. You are expected to identify and discuss the key aspects of current public health prevention and control strategies for your chosen disease in your chosen population of reference, including secondary prevention measures if these are relevant. Your discussion should be sufficiently detailed that a person previously unfamiliar with the recommendations would be able to understand them. You should try to relate recommended measures to biological and epidemiologic features of the disease that you have presented earlier in your essay. You should indicate if you believe that currently recommended measures are appropriate and likely to be effective, and why.
5. Finally, you should propose one or more recommendations to improve current prevention and control strategies for the communicable diseases that is the focus of your paper. You should clearly explain how your recommended strategy would work and why you think it would work. If possible, relate your explanation about why the measure(s) that you are recommending would work back to the epidemiologic and biologic features of the disease. Your proposed measure(s) are expected to be plausible, feasible, and consistent with current principles of public health practice. You are encouraged to be creative in your proposal for improvement and an original discussion (i.e., your own words, not material copied from another source) is expected.
