What Is a Disease?

dice
I have no idea what this means. I just do as our Benevolent Seed Overlords command

So our Benevolent Seed Overlords pose the question "What is a disease?" This question merely proves that longer questions are usually easier to answer than shorter ones.

So I've decided to change the question to "What is an infectious disease?" (cuz it's my blog). There are two underlying meanings of the word disease:

  1. An organism that lives on or in a host and that harms the health--that is, lowers the fitness--of that host.
  2. The effect of a parasite (the previously described organism) on the unhealthy host.

I like the first definition--or I should say I find it more interesting--because I really don't want to hear about your symptoms (mine, on the other hand, are fascinating to me). The etiological agent is far more interesting than a kvetching human.

More like this

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
One of the things I love about science--but that can also be frustrating--is that every new piece of information leads to a new unanswered question. We've learned so much about microbiology and human disease since the time of Koch and Pasteur, but in many other ways, we're still at square one.…
My SciBling Mike the Mad Biologist, who is an expert on antibiotic resistance, has an interesting post about an "epidemic" of commensal E. coli. It seems (if I understand his post correctly) that there is not the genetic range of E. coli lineages in humans as in animals. About 20% of our gut E.…
I'm still working on finishing up 3 manuscripts (one book, 2 journal articles) so I've not blogged quite as much this week as I generally do. Next week I should be back up to speed, and have a few topics in the queue that I want to get to. Luckily for you, though, John Hawks has a pair of…

My pathophysiology professor provided us with an interesting definition of disease once:

"Disease is the absence of health."

Of course, this doesn't really help much, but it certainly explains the problems of the "worried well"...

There's actually a pretty extensive literature addressing this question. And how it's answered turns out to be relevant to quite a number of important practical issues. Prominent among these is the question of the scope of medicine, and thus, the scope of medical expertise and professional duties. It's also of interest to health insurers, who would like to be able to demarcate healthcare from the promotion of various other social goods.

By bob koepp (not verified) on 11 Feb 2008 #permalink