B6 - Preventing and treating disease
- Created by: izz08
- Created on: 22-11-17 19:12
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- B6 - Preventing and treating disease
- Vaccination
- If a pathogen enters the body the immune system tries to destroy the pathogen
- Vaccination involves introducing small amounts of dead or inactive forms of a pathogen into your body to stimulate the white blood cells to produce antibodies.If the same live pathogen re-enters the body, the white blood cells respond quickly to produce the correct antibodies, preventing infection.
- If a large proportion of the population is immune to a pathogen, the spread of the pathogen is much reduced
- Antibiotics and painkillers
- Painkillers and some other medicines treat the symptoms of disease, but do not kill the pathogens that cause it
- Antibiotics cure bacterial diseases by killing the bacterial pathogens inside your body
- The use of antibiotics has greatly reduced deaths from infectious diseases
- The emergence of strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics is a matter of great concern
- Antibiotics do not destroy viruses because viruses reproduce inside the cells. It is difficult to develop drugs that can destroy viruses without damaging your body cells
- Discovering drugs
- Traditionally drugs were extracted from plants or from microorganisms
- Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming from the Penicillin mold
- Most new drugs are synthesized by chemits in the pharmaceutical industry. However, the starting point may still be a chemical extracted from a plant or fungus
- Developing drugs
- New medical drugs are extensively tetsed for efficacy,toxicity and dosage
- New drugs are tested in the labortary using cells, tissues and live animals
- Pre-clinical testing of new drugs takes place in a laboratory on cells, tissues, and live animals. Clinical trials use healthy volunteers and patients. Low doses are used to test for safety, followed by the higher doses to test for optimum dose.
- In double blind trials, some patients are given placebo. Neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is given the drug and who is given the placebo.
- Vaccination
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