Infectious diseases are diseases that can be transmitted to another person. They can come up if the immune system of a person has been weakened, and an organism can enter to inflict damage on the host. Microorganisms sometimes attack our tissue through the release of toxins or destructive enzyme. Clostridium Tentani is an example of this, which releases toxins and paralyzes the muscles.

Diagnosis involves taking samples of the infected area and analyzing them. Some minor diseases can be diagnoses visually. An example of this are warts, which are hard growths that are in similar shade to this skin.

Transmission of the diseases can happen in a variety of ways. Droplet contact means it's an airborne disease. It infects through the lungs from another person coughing or sneezing. They can also come from warm moist droplets from the infected body that enter through the nose, mouth, or eye surfaces.

Another way a person can be infected is through feces (poop) as well as sexual transmission. Fecal transmission is usually when food/water becomes contaminated with infected fecal, and can become infected through simply not washing your hands. Sexual transmission ends up being an STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease).

Infectious diseases can also be transmitted orally. This includes kissing, sharing a drinking glass, sharing a cigarette, or any other indirect contact that was produced orally. A common disease given this way is mono, also known as the kissing disease.

The final well known way is transmission via direct contact. This means that simply touching someone can infect them, in some cases not even the affected area. A couple of examples of this is athlete's foot and warts.

Not all infectious diseases affect a person, however. Polio, one of the deadliest infectious diseases pre-20^th century, only affected about 5% of people it infected. The first cure to polio was invented in 1955 by Jonas Salk, and it could only be developed with the understanding of Polio. These cures are mostly produced by creating a vaccine that contains part of the disease, which is the same part that someone would get if they survived the disease. This trains the immune system to fight the disease should it ever appear.

On the opposite side, however, some infectious diseases are almost impossible to not get. Mad cow disease almost always kills every living thing it can affect. There is no cure to mad cow disease, and no way to prevent it yet. Scientists will be able to prevent it with further study.

Infectious diseases kill millions of people on the planet every year. The only way to create more vaccines is to understand how the disease operates. Until we have this with all diseases, we can safely say there will always be an increasing interest in the subject.

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