COMING TO A BODY NEAR YOU?

A short guide
to tiny terrors
that can cause
big trouble.

They found it in the poop.

The

chimpanzee poop, to be specific. What scientists disocvered was the DNA that proved that human
immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) had evolved from simian immuno-deficiency virus (SIV) found in
chimpanzees in west central Africa . Scientists think the virus was transmitted to humans when
they butchered and ate chimpanzees. Sickening, indeed.

A VIRUS doesnt have a cell to call its

own. Its really just a bit of genetic material

(RNA or DNA), a few proteins or enzymes, with
a protective covering called a capsid.
But thats all a tiny little virion (a single virus
particle) needs once its safely inside a host cell
where it takes over and begins to reproduce
itself, sometimes by the millions.
Viruses are transmitted in all kinds of ways, and
can cross species, but what they always need is
the host cell to replicate.

VIRAL DISEASES include:

Ebola
HIV
Zika
Rabies
Hantavirus
Influenza
Rotavirus
Dengue

HI-VIRION Structure: Notice the

RNA strand at the center. Once inside
the host cell, the RNA goes to work.
Image available from NAID, a division of the
National Institute of Health, through the Creative
Commons License Attribution 2.0 license.

Before Smallpox was finally eradicated, it killed an estimated 300 million

people in the 20th century alone.

Mary was quite contrary.

Today shes

known by the unfortunate name of Typhoid Mary, but her real name was Mary Mallon. Mary
was a cook, and she loved to cook. One tiny (terror) problem: she was also a carrier for the
bacterium Salmonella typhi, and so her cooking led to the illness and deaths of others. Because Mary
never got sick herself she didnt believe health officials when they told she was making people sick,
so she kept on cooking, until she was forcibly confined for the last 26 years of her life until her
death in 1938.




BACTERIA is a dirty word to some
people, but the truth is we all need bacteria for
certain functions. Bacteria are prokaryotesthat
is, they have a cell, a single cell, but the cell has
no nucleus.
Hygiene is important to the control of bacterial
disease, and unlike viruses, bacterial diseases
have responded to antibioticsat least until
now, with resistant diseases on the rise.

BACTERIAL DISEASES
include:

Tuberculosis
Typhoid (a form of salmonella)
Typhus
MRSA (multi-drug resistant
Staphylococcus aureus)
Pneumonia
Syphilis
Tetanus
Salmonella
Botulism
E-Coli related illnesses

SALMONELLA typhi: Typhoid

fever is a form of Salmonella, while
Typhus is caused by the bacterium
Rickettsia.

Image available from Wikimedia Commons through

the Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0
International license.

Bite me! No, really.

The Plasmodium parasite that causes

malaria makes an infected mosquito hungrier so that it feeds more often and bites more people. No
surprise there. But it also changes the odor of the infected person, creating a smell like an irresistible
mosquito feast, making it more likely that uninfected mosquitoes will come calling for dinner and
continue to spread the disease.

A PARASITE is an organism that feeds

off another organism without immediately or

even necessarily killing itwhich doesnt mean
that parasites cant be deadly. Some of the most
common disease-causing parasites are protist or
protozoans, that is, one-celled organisms.
Parasites reproduce sexually, but they need a
host to invade to complete the process. Humans
are hosts for plasmodium parasite, but the
female Anopheles mosquito is also both host and
vector (the agent of transmission), although host
mosquitoes dont get sick the way humans do.

PARASITIC DISEASES include:

Malaria
Giardia
Cryptosporidium (the leading
cause of water-borne disease in
the U.S.)

PLASMODIUM lifecycle: In the

human body, Plasmodium makes its

first stop in the liver.

Image by LaRoche Labs, UC Riverside, available
through the Creative Commons 3.0 Unported
licensec.

References:
Filio, M., Tsoucalas, G., Karamanou, M. & Androutsos, G. (2013). Mary Mallon (1869-1938)
and the history of typhoid fever. Annals of Gastroenterology 26 (2), 132-134. Retrieved
from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/
Malaria. (n.d.) Center for Disease Control. Retrieved
from http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/
Starr, C., Taggart, R., Evers, C., Starr, L. (2016). Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life, 14th ed.
Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
Credits:
Copyright-free comic illustration from Pixabay.com.