Measles Virus - Essay Example

Question 1: What is measles?

Measles is a highly contagious disease that is mostly caused by a virus. The virus usually lives in the throat and mucus of infected people. It is spread through coughing, physical contact with an infected person, or sneezing. The infected droplets in the mucus can sometimes remain active with the pathogens for around 2 hours(CDC). That implies that the virus can be found on fomites, like door handles, mugs, car handles, and many other common surfaces. Once one gets infected by measles, he or she exhibits an array of signs and symptoms suggestive of the disease. The initial symptoms of the disease included a high fever, accompanied by running noise and conjunctivitis(CDC). After some time, the person can develop rashes on the face that can spread to the back and trunk.

In some cases, it can also present as pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis, febrile convulsions, diarrhea, laryngitis, otitis media, bronchitis, and croup. Once a diagnosis of measles is made, treatment has always to be provided. Such medications are provided to prevent worsening symptoms or suspected complications. Commonly prescribed drugs are antipyretics, antibiotics, rehydration agents, and cough syrups(CDC). For primary prevention of the disease, immunization is often used for children under the age of 5 years.

Measles can have a usual occurrence and an unusual occurrence. That implies that the symptoms of measles can vary from person to person. In some people, measles can present as a rash, conjunctivitis, and running nose together with fever, and take a period of more than a week for it to heal. In other people, the disease can progress to a worse state resulting in various complications(CDC).

Currently, due to the lack of treatment for measles once one gets it, as it is entirely dependent on one’s immune system, quite a number of complications can result from it. When one has measles, one loses a lot of fluids through running noise, high fevers, and diarrhea, hence resulting in an electrolyte imbalance shift together with dehydration. Dehydration can have several complications if not corrected in advance(CDC). Patients can suffer from complications of electrolyte depletion like hypokalemia, hypernatremia, hypocalcemia, hypomagnesemia, and loss of other elements.

Measles in Iceland is believed to have come from the North of the country and infected the town of Reykjavic first. It later spread to three towns on the opposite side of the country and thereafter to the densely-populated southwest. Finally, there was a breakout of the disease on the entire island.

Measles is widely spread from one person to the other through air ass it is highly contagious. When people interacted from town to town in earlier times, an infected person would either cough or sneeze and this was good enough to send the victim home with the disease which would thereafter spread to neighboring family and friends and eventually the entire community. Measles was spread in Iceland mainly via the movement of people from town to town and interaction with the outside world using steamships across the sea.

Question 3

Geography is considered interdisciplinary since it covers subjects across many fields. It touches a little bit on the politics of a certain place, a little bit about the culture of a people at a certain time, and a lot about the historical-geographical features of places.

Geography connects many fields such as science, English, Maths, and Visual Arts, among others. In regard to science, students learn of the effect of climate change on the ecosystem. In English, there has been the development of response structure and meta-language to large questions. The use of scale and bearings show just how much Maths is employed in geography. Visual arts have been employed by teachers of geography to vivify changing environments and students as well as teachers have found useful aid of google maps in learning and teaching geography.