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Communicable diseases, animal health and One Health

Infectious diseases in people and animals: outbreaks, surveillance, India's disease programmes, and the One Health approach that joins human, animal and environmental health. Prelims has asked which disease the H1N1 virus is linked to and whether viruses spread only through vectors.

Foundation note: The diseases Prelims asks: pathogen, vector, programme

Lumpy skin disease: A viral disease of cattle and buffaloes that causes fever and hard nodules in the skin.

Ring vaccination: Vaccinating every susceptible animal in a ring around an outbreak, building a barrier of immunity that stops the disease spreading outward.

zoonosis: A disease that spreads from animals to humans.

One Health: Treating human, animal and environmental health as one linked problem rather than three separate ones.

Incidence: New cases in a population over a set period, which allows fair comparison between places of different size.

Biological disaster: A disaster caused by living organisms or their toxins: an epidemic, a pandemic, or a deliberate release of a pathogen.

National Disaster Management Plan: The country's plan under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, setting out who does what in prevention, mitigation, response and recovery.

BSL 3: A Biosafety Level 3 laboratory, built to handle dangerous airborne pathogens.

Shigellosis: A diarrhoeal disease caused by Shigella bacteria, marked by fever, cramps and bloody diarrhoea.

Eschar: A dark scab at the site of the mite's bite.

Chigger: The larval mite that spreads scrub typhus.

Also filed elsewhere

Dengue vaccines: Qdenga, DengiAll and antibody dependent enhancement · on Vaccines and immunisation
Dengue has four serotypes, and antibodies from a first infection can help a different serotype enter cells in a second, which is antibody dependent enhancement and is why dengue vaccines are hard to design: vaccination raises type specific antibodies, which block one serotype, and cross reactive antibodies, which block all four only at high levels and can enhance a new infection into severe dengue once they wane.