It's Contagious | The lowdown on all things contagious, from the flu to strange diseases

It’s That Time Of Year Again

Ah, the seasons they are a changin’ and for many people that means allergies. We’ve been stuck inside for the past four months dealing with winter and finally the temperatures are rising and that means we can go outside.

Just when we got over the colds and the flu, our nasal passages are hit with another assault as springtime allergies come out in full force. Allergies aren’t technically contagious because they are not caused by viruses or bacteria.

An allergy is caused by pollen and dust in the air. The flowers and plants that come out in spring are great for making the world look beautiful, but their pollen can be murder on the nose and lungs. Allergies are when a person’s body has a reaction to an outside stimulus. Some people are allergic to plants, food and animals, but for the spring allergies are general associated with dust and pollen.

Newspapers and television stations have people who count the pollen and dust and give ratings so people with allergies can decide if they need to take medication or not. Many people need to take pills that help relieve swelling in the nasal passages and other symptoms. While allergies can be a pain for people, employers don’t generally see them as a reason for taking off work.

Symptoms of seasonal allergies include runny and stuffed up nose, sneezing, coughing and occasionally body rash. Some people can have extreme reactions and have difficulty breathing or go into shock.

Whooping Cough

When I was a kid, whooping cough, or pertussis, was one of those diseases that you heard of, but no one actually got. There was a vaccine available that pretty much ended the problem in most industrial countries, but it continued to be a problem in lesser developed areas.

The disease is caused by a bacterial infection and most often attacks children. It’s a highly contagious respiratory disease that starts off as the symptoms of a standard cold such as runny nose and minor cough, but continues to become a paralyzing cough. The name whooping cough is derived from the sound small children make when then try to inhale a breath after a coughing fit.

The disease has an incubation period of about 7-10 days and is easily passed from person to person. The cough becomes severe leading to broken and bruised ribs, vomiting, hernias and feinting. The coughing fits are generally triggered by yawning, yelling or other action requiring acute respiratory need. It can take a few weeks for the cough to subside on its own, but antibiotics can help shorten the duration.

The doctor will swab the patient and seek a culture to determine if whooping cough is caused. With more parents foregoing immunizations due to perceived health risks, whooping cough is once again rearing its ugly head in the United States. There are thousands of cases each year and doctors are encouraging parents get their children immunized against the disease as soon as possible.

The problem has become so severe that the elderly are also encouraged to seek vaccination and prevent the acquisition of the disease.

Your Immune System

When a contagious disease enters your system, there are a series of obstacles that it has to go through in order to actually infect you and make you sick. You body is hit with bacteria and viruses constantly, but over time your body has developed an immunity to many of them.

This happens through becoming sick and getting better, vaccinations and genetics. The first line of defense in preventing illness if your own skin. It's a barrier that keeps the bad things out. It's rare for a virus to be able to infect you from skin contact unless the skin is cut and it has a direct route to your blood stream.

Your skin is like a wall. That's why it's important to wash your hands, so you don't end up letting the disease inside your body through contact. Once the the virus makes into your body through either an orifice such as the nose or mouth, your internal defenses kick in. Once the body realizes there is foreign matter in it, it starts to attack it.

Your nose starts creating extra mucous to trap the virus and keep it from getting further inside. You body heats up to kill the virus and your white blood cells attack it and destroy the individual viruses. Ironically, many of the symptoms of diseases are actually just the body way of combating them.

Viruses and bacteria are smart can adapt over time. Antibodies may be able to beat a specific type of virus or bacteria, but one slight change in its chemical makeup and its like a brand new disease.

Fictional Diseases

While the world of disease is full of strange names and even stranger symptoms, writers have been dreaming up their own illnesses for centuries. Often, these diseases are unlike anything in the real world, but they definitely bear some mentioning. Enjoy this list of fictional diseases.

Brain Cloud – Tom Hanks was diagnosed with a Brain Cloud in Joe Versus the Volcano. The disease has no symptoms and kills painlessly in six months. It turns out the disease didn’t exist in the film either and was just a way get Joe to throw himself into a volcano.

The Fever – This is one of the most disgusting diseases I have ever had the displeasure of seeing. The movie Cabin Fever featured this type of aggressive and contagious necrotizing fasciitis. The disease starts as a rash and pretty soon your body is decomposing and you’re throwing up blood. It causes a major breakdown in the skin and kills 100 percent of the time.

The Coma – Clive Barker is a master of horror, but the odd little movie The Plague showed that he may have some issues with his parents. The disease affects children under 18 to immediately go into a coma for 10 years. When they wake up, they simply want to kill their parents. Yeah, he doesn’t need any kind of therapy.

Goldfield Syndrome – Diseases aren’t usually a component of romantic comedies, but in 50 first Dates, Adam Sandler falls for a girl with the disease. It causes the person to completely forget whatever happens during the day, so they always wake up thinking it’s the same day.

Conjunctivitis: Childhood Wouldn't Be The Same Without It

When my children started school, I was expecting them to come home every know and then with the sniffles, strep throat or even the full blown flu. I also knew that I would be hit by these same diseases and prepared myself for the inevitable multitude of doctor's appointment that go along with it.

I was not expecting the disease of conjunctivitis, more commonly known as pink eye. Pink eye makes your eye look like hamburger. It's red and puffy and it creates a puss that crustifies to your eyes and makes it almost impossible to open in the morning.

It's also one of the most contagious of the childhood ailments. The cause is a bacteria found most commonly in feces. When a child touches feces or an object with feces on it, they can transfer the bacteria to their hands and eventually to their eye. By feces, I don't mean patient zero grabbed a handful of poop, but instead may have gone to the bathroom and not washed his hands or touched an object that had some microscopic fecal matter on it.

Once the bacteria is on the hands, then it gets transferred via touch to other children. These children t rub their eye and the next step is pink eye. Other than being incredibly contagious and a cosmetic nightmare, pink eye isn't very dangerous. You can get antibiotics to kill it right away, or in most cases with will eventually go away on its own. Children with pink eye cannot go to school because of the contagion issue.

Mysterious Disease Kills Thousands In Central America

Although the causes are not known, it's devastating manual laborers from Panama to Mexico.

A mysterious disease is ravaging the population of Central American countries, killing 24,000 since 2000 and hobbling thousands of others with kidney failure and kidney disease. Health officials have yet to determine the cause of the disease, but have been able to rule out a few common man-made causes of debilitating disease of this nature. All the same, the disease is untreatable and seems to hit the labor classes more so than others in countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama.

The health minister of El Salvador, Dr. Maria Isabel Rodriguez, announced last year that the strange epidemic was undermining public health systems and appealed to international help, according to The Huffington Post. Looking at the populations most heavily hit by this disease, which has lead to chronic kidney disease and kidney failure from southern Mexico to Panama, many experts and activists have pointed to the heavy use of industrial chemicals and pesticides in the highly agriculture areas. However, many of the same chemicals are used in other parts of the world that have not seen evidence of the disease, and individuals in other industries like construction are seeing massive rates of the disease as well.

Many health experts are now looking into exposure, rather than workers’ exposure to particular chemicals, as a possible cause. Many of the manual laborers that seem to be disproportionately effected by this disease, labor in stifling heat (108 degrees F and higher in some areas) for hours straight with little water. Pushing their bodies in this way, often from the time they are preteens, day after day for years on end may be a trigger for the kind of chronic kidney disease only seen among diabetes and heart-disease patients. Although there’s little evidence to support this hypothesis yet, the chronic dehydration over the course of years seems a plausible cause of kidney disease, and would explain why the disease is so widespread among laborers that toil in the sun year after year.

Regardless of the cause, the epidemic is previously unknown and is deadly. However, it has not seen much international attention due to the fact that it has been such a localized phenomenon, effecting on region within a fairly ignored area of the world. All the same, more highly industrialized nations treat these kinds of kidney-related symptoms early and easily with dialysis. However, in the more impoverished areas where many of these disease-stricken laborers reside, kidney disease is treated more cheaply, or not at all, greatly increasing the mortality rate from the disease. It is a rate that seems to be increasing each year, necessitating more international aid and awareness.

Disease Paranoia Or The Toilet Seat Phenomenon

When there is a new disease on the rise whether its something like SARS or flesh eating bacteria, people tend to go a little overboard. Paranoia is a natural state of being for many of us and when people start dropping like flies because of some new strain of whatever, our fear of death kicks in.

I like to call this the toilet seat phenomenon. Most diseases required some kind of way to get into the body. There are few diseases that can be absorbed through the skin and require a cut or to be inhaled in order to spread in the body. Human skin is a shield that few creepy crawlies can penetrate.

Yet, once the paranoia has set in, diseases start taking on superhuman qualities. They go from Pee Wee Herman to the Wolverine of bacteria and viruses. I remember during the height of the AIDS scare people were scared to death that they could get this fatal disease from sitting on the same toilet seat as someone that had the disease.

Those inflicted would have to somehow bleed or ejaculate on the toilet seat and then you would have to sit on it where you some kind of scratch or cut. I don't know about you, but I am pretty sure I would notice both blood and the other on a toilet seat before I sat down and in all my years I don't remember having too my cuts on my butt.

Yet, even today if you go into a bathroom odds are there is a little area where you can pull off a toilet seat cover to keep your butt safe from adamantium laced bacteria.

HIV and AIDS

There are few contagious diseases that have had the modern impact as HIV and AIDS. The human immunodeficiency virus has been around for a while, but first began gaining notoriety in the 1980s. The virus attacks the white blood cells, making them unable to fight off disease, which eventually kills the patient.

People don't often die of the actual HIV virus, but the host of other viruses that impact the body. A cold can lead to pneumonia and a simple bacteria can become lethal. The most common way of contracting the disease is through sexual contact, but it can also be spread via blood contact and by mother to child through the umbilical cord or breast feeding.

In 1995, it was the number one killer of people between the ages of 25-44, but has fallen to fifth thanks to the development of medications and treatments to improve immune response. Millions of dollars has been spent on treating this disease, which at one time has an almost 100 percent casualty rate. Now, people with the disease can live decades if they are able to keep up with the difficult regimen of medication developed.

AIDS and HIV is relatively controlled in the United States, but in smaller third world countries where contraception such as condoms are rarely used, the transfer rate is phenomenal. Since mothers can transfer it to the children, there are millions of children who come into the world with the disease. It is estimated that there are more than 33 million people living with the disease.

Contagious Diseases: Mutations

Mother Nature has a way of making sure her creations stay around as long as possible. When there is something disrupting the natural order, species have the ability to adapt and mutate to meet these changes head on.

For example, if a frog is being threatened by a specific form of fertilizer, then over several generations a frog may be born with a natural immunity. That frog will go on and procreate to create more frogs that are immune to the fertilizers. Soon, all the frogs not immune are dead and the balance is restored as the immune frogs flourish.

It's the same way with contagious diseases. This is why it is so difficult to completely eradicate a disease. When a bacteria or virus is hit with something that will weaken or destroy it, such as a antibiotic, it dies, but over time some of the bacteria will develop a natural immunity. The other bacteria die off and the immune bacteria flourish.

This natural immunity is caused by a mutation in the disease's basic structure. These mutations are the reason why there are so many antibiotics on the market and why more are being developed. If a contagious disease develops a mutation that makes treatment ineffective, then it can have a devastating impact on society.

Luckily, mutations take a long time to develop and we usually find out about it long before it becomes a problem. Once a strain of bacteria or virus is discovered that is immune to treatment, then scientists immediately begin developing a new treatment.

Leprosy

Leprosy is the kind of disease that has a major stigma attached to it. It has been around since biblical times and has been referenced in the Bible and other works of the time. People that contracted leprosy were segregated and exiled from their homes and forced to live in a separate colony to prevent the further spread of the disease.

The disease is caused by a bacteria and creates lesions on the skin and in some cases large bumps and nodules, deforming the victim. Sufferes would wrap themselves in blankets and shrouds to hide their face from the public and were often victims of stoning and other harassment. It was greatly feared in Biblical times and many were thought to be possessed by demons andwere killed because of this.

One of the common myths about leprosy is that it causes parts of the body to rot and eventually fall off. This isn't true, but it can contribute to decomposition. If the lesions are not cleaned regularly, then they can develop gangrene, which kills the skin and can lead to a serious life threatening infection.

While there are treatments for the disease that makes it less life threatening today, it is still very common in many undeveloped countries. In the United States, there are about 100 new cases per year. There is no longer a need to separate those people with the disease because there are medical treatments available, but it is imperative that the disease is caught early. This can reduce the risk of permanent nerve damaged caused by the disease.

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