B6 - Preventing and Treating Disease Flashcards
What happens if a pathogen enters the body?
The immune system tries to destroy the pathogen
What happens during vaccination?
- Involves introducing small amounts of dead or inactive forms of pathogen into your body to stimulate the white blood cells to produce antibodies.
- If the same live pathogen re-enters the body, the white blood cells respond quickly to produce correct antibodies, preventing infection.
What happens if a large proportion of a population is immune to a certain pathogen?
The spread of the pathogen is much reduced.
Characteristics of painkillers.
Treat the symptoms of disease but do not kill the pathogens that cause it.
Characteristics of antibiotics.
- Cure bacterial diseases by killing the bacterial pathogens in your body.
- Heavily reduced deaths from infectious diseases.
- Emergence of great strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics is a matter of great concern.
- Don’t destroy viruses because viruses reproduce inside the cells.
- Difficult to develop drugs that can destroy viruses without damaging your body cells.
Where did drugs used to be traditionally extracted from?
Plants - digitalis.
Microorganisms - penicillin.
How and when was the extraction of penicillin founded?
- found by Alexander Fleming from the penicillium mould.
What is the process of new drugs by chemists?
- Synthesised in the pharmaceutical industry.
- Starting point may still be a chemical extracted from a plant.
What happens with new medical drugs?
- Extensively tested for efficacy, toxicity and dosage.
- Tested in the laboratory using cells, tissues and live animals.
What happens in the preclinical testing of drugs?
- Takes place in laboratory on cells, tissues and live animals.
What happens in clinical trials?
- Use healthy volunteers and patients.
- Low doses are used to test for safety, followed by higher doses to test fro optimum dose.
What happens in double blind trials?
- Some people are given a placebo.
