4 Treatment and Prevention

Activity 2

Stop that Disease

In this activity students design an effective plan for treatment (if any exists) and prevention of one disease on the Timeline of Infectious Diseases. Working individually, with a partner or in teams, they use information on the timeline and any other information they can find about the disease, and information from Reading 2 “protection from infection” to design an intervention that will treat and/or prevent the disease.

The purpose of this activity is to have students consider the challenges of eliminating infectious diseases, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where the costs of improving infrastructure could be prohibitive and access to medical care could be difficult.

They should also recognize that changing human behavior whether based in religious or personal beliefs could be challenging. This issue was addressed also in Module 2 – Seeking the Cause.

Alternatively this activity could be conducted as a game. In this game students design an intervention for a disease and have an unexpected event interfere with their plan such that they must redesign their plan. The purpose of this game is to help students get a feel for the complexity of designing plans for public health because of many different variables and unanticipated events.

  1. Prepare two types of cards:
    1. Disease cards – each card would have a disease from the timeline and information about that disease that would include the biology of the infectious agent and the context for the epidemic (e.g. cholera in 19th century London)
    2. Turn of Event cards – Each card would have some event that presented an event or challenge that affected the treatment or prevention of the disease (e.g. a power failure at the clinic resulted in loss of the vaccines because of lack of refrigeration or a visitor arrived yesterday from a neighboring country where an outbreak has been reported. Today the visitor is exhibiting symptoms of the disease).
    3. Divide the class into teams and give each team a Disease card.
    4. Have each team develop a plan for treating the disease and preventing its spread.
    5. When the teams have completed their plans, hand them a “Turn of Event card” that may disrupt their carefully designed plan. Their challenge is now to redesign their plan to account for the unexpected turn of events.
    6. Have students share their plans and revised plans with the class.

    Not all infectious diseases can be treated and cured successfully but most can be prevented. As you learned in Reading 2 - An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Treatment, prevention of infectious diseases can occur at several levels: at the community infrastructure level, at the personal care level, and through vaccination. In order to decide the best course of action it is critical to understand several aspects of the disease:

    1. The causative agent
    2. The mode of transmission (direct contact, aerosol, food or water borne, vector borne)
    3. Source of the infection (contaminated water or food, infected individuals, animal vectors etc.)
    4. Risk factors and populations at risk

    Once the factors are known, then effective actions and measures can be taken to protect a population from infection. For example, in 19th century London a doctor, John Snow, identified a city water pump as the source of the ongoing cholera epidemic and the at risk population were the people who used water from this pump for drinking and cooking. Once the handle of the pump was removed the number of cholera cases plummeted (see Module 1 – About Infectious Disease for more about John Snow and the London cholera epidemic).

    In this activity you and your team/partner will design an effective plan for treatment (if any exists) and prevention of one disease on the Timeline of Infectious Diseases. Using information on the timeline and any other information you can find prepare a plan that includes:

    1. The causative agent
    2. The mode of transmission
    3. Source of the infection (contaminated water or food, infected individuals, animal vectors etc.)
    4. The populations at risk
    5. The economic, social and cultural factors involved in the epidemic
    6. Proposed interventions to treat the disease (if any) and to prevent the disease from spreading and recurring
    7. Possible challenges and barriers to implementation of your plan