The Global Prevalence of Tuberculosis Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay (Essay Sample)

For this assignment, you are to select one of the communicable diseases listed below.
Tuberculosis
Malaria
Zika
Ebola
Hepatitis B
Dengue
Genital Chlamydia
In your essay, you are to discuss the nature and key public health aspects of the disease that you have chosen.
You should explain the burden that it represents for humans, how humans come to be infected, biological
aspects of the infecting agent that are important in transmission and disease, and some of the most important
recommended public health control measures to reduce the burden of disease. Finally, you should propose one
or more recommendations to improve current prevention and control strategies for the disease.
For some of the choices presented above, you will probably want to focus on the situation and issues presented
by the disease in an international context. For others, a U.S. focus is more appropriate. While in general
epidemiologic data are more available for U.S. populations than for populations outside the United States, you
should be able to find adequate information for your paper on any of the conditions listed above. You should
explicitly state the population focus of your essay; in other words, is your paper about Disease X in the United
States, about Disease X globally, or about Disease X in a particular country.
You are expected to obtain your information from reliable sources such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, World Health Organization, or other
scientifically reputable organizations; use of more than one source for the paper is required. Try to minimize use
of secondary and lay media sources.
As was the case for your first essay assignment, you are to:
1. Describe the agent and its key characteristics. What is the agent? What are key characteristics of
the agent that influence its transmission, virulence, and the ease/difficulty of prevention and
control? Is there a vector or intermediate host? If so, what are the characteristics of the vector or
intermediate host?
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2. Describe the disease. What are its major manifestations? How does the disease affect individuals
who get it? You should describe the symptoms and signs of the disease so that an educated lay
person would have a good sense of what the disease is and how it affects people after reading your
description. If there are important complications or long-term sequelae of this communicable
disease, these should be included in your description. Who is the disease most likely to affect (are
there differences according to gender, age, racial/ethnic group, or other host characteristics?).
Where is it common? Have there been important trends in occurrence over time? Are asymptomatic
cases common and how do they affect the epidemiology and control of the disease? Is longterm/chronic infection an issue with this disease? If so, how does this affect the prospects for
prevention and control?
3. Describe the epidemiology of the disease and mode of transmission. Discuss how the disease is
transmitted in the population(s) that you selected and the impact of the disease. How is the disease
transmitted, in general, and the most important modes of transmission in your chosen settings?
What is the burden of this disease upon your population—how much of the disease is there
(incidence/prevalence)? How much death and disability does the disease cause in your population?
What is the case fatality rate? What are the economic or other costs? Are there groups or types of
people that are more affected by this problem than others? Why are these group at a higher risk?
How do people acquire the disease? In other words, how is it transmitted to humans? How likely is it
that an exposed person will be infected? Are there factors that make transmission or less likely?
Who is at particular risk? Try to relate the biological characteristics of agent and host to the
epidemiology and transmission of the disease.
4. Discuss current recommendations for prevention and control of your selected disease. You are
expected to identify and discuss the key aspects of current public health prevention and control
strategies for your chosen disease in your chosen population of reference, including secondary
prevention measures if these are relevant. Your discussion should be sufficiently detailed that a
person previously unfamiliar with the recommendations would be able to understand them. You
should try to relate recommended measures to biological and epidemiologic features of the disease
that you have presented earlier in your essay. You should indicate if you believe that currently
recommended measures are appropriate and likely to be effective, and why.
5. Finally, you should propose one or more recommendations to improve current prevention and
control strategies for the communicable diseases that is the focus of your paper. You should clearly
explain how your recommended strategy would work and why you think it would work. If possible,
relate your explanation about why the measure(s) that you are recommending would work back to
the epidemiologic and biologic features of the disease. Your proposed measure(s) are expected to
be plausible, feasible, and consistent with current principles of public health practice. You are
encouraged to be creative in your proposal for improvement and an original discussion (i.e., your
own words, not material copied from another source) is expected.
While it is expected that you will obtain the background information for your essay from reference sources, a
paper composed by cutting and pasting or a paper that consists mostly of quoted information is discouraged.
Use your own words as much as possible. You are expected to summarize and distill a lot of important
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information into a logical, readable essay that could be used as a briefing paper or information summary for a
busy public health professional.