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In biology, a pathogen (Greek: πάθος, pathos "suffering", "passion" and -γενής, -genēs "producer of"), in the oldest and broadest sense, is any organism or agent that can produce disease. A pathogen may also be referred to as an infectious agent, or simply a germ. [1] The term pathogen came into use in the 1880s.
A related coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, in November 2019 and spread rapidly around the world. Thought to have originated in bats and subsequently named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 , infections with the virus cause a disease called COVID-19 , that varies in severity from mild to deadly, [ 69 ] and led to a pandemic in ...
Once a pathogen has been associated with an illness, researchers have reported difficulty displacing these pre-existing theories. [3] [4] 3. Variable pathogenicity: Infection with pathogens can produce varying responses in hosts, complicating the process of showing a relationship between infection and the pathogen. [5]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to concepts related to infectious diseases in humans.. Infection – transmission, entry/invasion after evading/overcoming defense, establishment, and replication of disease-causing microscopic organisms (pathogens) inside a host organism, and the reaction of host tissues to them and to the toxins they produce.
This technology is now being used to investigate novel vaccine strategies. [227] The ability to synthesise viruses has far-reaching consequences, since viruses can no longer be regarded as extinct, as long as the information of their genome sequence is known and permissive cells are available.
Until 2022, the most sequenced pathogens are Salmonella enterica and E. coli - Shigella. [10] The sequencing technologies, the bioinformatics tools, the databases, statistics related to pathogen genomes and the applications in forensics, epidemiology, clinical practice and food safety have been extensively reviewed. [10]
This can be measured as virulence, which can be used to compare the quantitative degree of pathology between related viruses. In other words, different virus strains possessing different virus factors can lead to different degrees of virulence, which in turn can be exploited to study the differences in pathogenesis of viral variants with ...
Bacterial pathogens also require access to carbon and energy sources for growth. To avoid competition with host cells for glucose which is the main energy source used by human cells, many pathogens including the respiratory pathogen Haemophilus influenzae specialise in using other carbon sources such as lactate that are abundant in the human ...