What are the Principles of Treatment and Prevention
Principles of Treatment
There are to ways to treat an infectious (communicable) disease. These are –
- To reduce the effects of the disease : It can be done by providing symptomatic treatment. We can provide treatment that will reduce the symptoms which are usually because of inflammation.
- To kill the cause of the disease, i.e., pathogens. The most common method to kill disease-causing microbes is to use medicines that kill microbes. We have to choose a specific drug that is effective against a particular group of microbes. This is what is achieved by antibiotics.
Principles of Prevention
Ways of Prevention of Infectious Diseases :
There are two ways of prevention of infectious diseases :
- General ways
- Specific ways
1. General ways of prevention of infectious diseases : These include
- Sanitation : Public hygiene is one basic key to the prevention of infectious (communicable) diseases.
- Eradication of vectors : Vector-borne infections can be prevented by providing clean environments. The breeding places of vectors should be destroyed and adult vectors killed by suitable methods.
- Sterilization : Patients’s surroundings and articles of use should be sterilized. Soap, phenyl, dettol, and antiseptic lotion may be used wherever necessary.
- Isolation : A person suffering from an infectious disease shoule be kept in isolation so that others do not catch infection from him.
- Education : People should be educated about the infectious disease so that they may protect themselves against such infections.
- Proper and sufficient food : Availability of proper (nutritious) and sufficient food to everyone will make people healthy to resist infections.
- Proper immunization against diseases.
2. Specific ways of prevention of infectious diseases :
Specific ways of prevention of infectious diseases relate to a peculiar property of the immune system that usually fights off microbial infections. This is the basis of the principle of immunisation.