District Reply to Tan
District Reply to Tan
Tan
Inital Response:
In terms of the COVID-19 pandemic, I think we can see this with the rapid spread of COVID-19 within America, but also in the spread of the new variants. When we look at Covid-19 in comparison to the SARs pandemic, both carry similar origins and attack the respiratory system as RNA viruses within the Coronaviridae family (Caldaria et al., 2020). However we see that Covid-19 has been significantly more widely spread globally and has a much higher prevalence rate, but SARS has a higher mortality rate. In this case, you could state that since SARS was much more controlled in its spread, the virus evolved into a less lethal virus that allows it to be much more contagious and more difficult to identify. Since Covid-19 can go undetected in asymptomatic individuals, it is able to spread much quicker within gatherings and families, while SARS had a shorter incubation period and would have symptoms appear quicker. In terms of infectious rate, COVID-19 was found to have an R0 number ranging from 1.95-5 as more research is performed while SARS was only 3. Then when we account for the new COVID-19 variants in the U.K., South Africa, and Brazil despite the arrival of the vaccine, we could say that while we have reached a potential end to the pandemic, COVID-19 is evolving at a rate to compete with human research to infect our population as much as possible. While our food quality has improved so much, we have also seen an increase in other diseases that were not as widespread before such as E.coli and Salmonella. With the increasing industrialization, a lot of companies will try to make food harvesting and processing processes as efficient as possible to increase profit margins which can lead to oversight in the safety and easy spread of these bacteria from animal fecal matter to fruits, vegetables, and meat. Despite this, we’ve seen many changes year after year for rises and falls in E.coli and Salmonella infections rates, but no solutions to completely remove the chance of infection despite increasing usage of poultry vaccinations and USDA quality oversight (Schnirring, 2018). While we have come to use processes such as pasteurization for dairy products, there are so many strains of E.coli and Salmonella that have arisen in response to our attempts to decontaminate our crops and animals that have become much more resistant to treatments. Overall, I would say that while our health standards and treatments have been developing very quickly, many bacteria and viral diseases have also evolved as a response and we need to be aware of this for public health.
Caldaria, A., Conforti, C., Di Meo, N., Dianzani, C., Jafferany, M., Lotti, T., . . . Giuffrida, R. (2020, July). COVID-19 and SARS: Differences and similarities. Retrieved February 03, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7235519/ (Links to an external site.)
Schnirring, L. (2018, March 23). CDC says Some FoodNet Salmonella infections rising. Retrieved February 03, 2021, from https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/03/cdc-says-some-foodnet-salmonella-infections-rising (Links to an external site.)
