-
Asked by coolragz to Bob, Katie, Nisha, Sallie, Vee on 27 Jun 2012.
-
Sallie Baxendale answered on 27 Jun 2012:
Really good question. I guess the most dangerous diseases are the ones that spread very fast and kill you before you even have a chance to try to get to the doctor. There are some very nasty tropical diseases that can kill you within a few hours. Fortunately there aren’t too many of those, particularly in our country, but there are still quite a few that we don’t have any treatments for.
Other diseases are dangerous because they are very contagious. Airborn infections mean that you don’t even have to be in direct contact with an infected person to catch the disease, so they can be very dangerous. Every now and then a very dangerous flu virus emerges like this and it can kill millions of people before it dies out. Between1918-1919, over 40 million people died in a flu pandemic in 12 months.
BUT by far the biggest killer in the UK is heart disease. The good news is that you can start to significantly reduce your risk of getting heart disease , even at your age, by making sure you get plenty of exercise and reducing the amount of fat in your diet.
-
-
Katie McDonald answered on 28 Jun 2012:
Hi coolragz, as a pathologist, I do post mortems. We have to have a lot of vaccinations against diseases in case a patient infects us (as well as taking precautions against cutting ourselves). Possibly infectious bodies are sorted into categories 1-4. 3 is considered “high risk”, e.g. hepatitis, HIV. 4 is considered too high risk to even do post mortems on – diseases like viral haemorrhagic fevers e.g. ebola virus. If you catch one of these viruses you bleed a lot internally and there’s no treatment. A lot of these come from sub-Saharan Africa so don’t pop up too much in the UK!
-
Bob Bonwick answered on 2 Jul 2012:
Oooo Katie you beat me to that! Ebola is a nasty disease indeed. There are other disease out there that are also incredibly nasty, some are bacteria (Botulism in food), Viruses (AIDS – a sexually transmitted diease that kills off your immune system so anything else can kill you, and is currently incurable, but is very well treated now), fungus (there are a few that affect the lungs and also kidneys). There are also smaller types, CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease) is cused by something called a Prion Protein. You can also contract disease from parasites, some are relatively harmless (tapeworm), others are not. I think out of all of these the MOST dangerous would possibly be AIDS or CJD, based on how they work and affect people.
Comments