Science as Human Endeavour Task

Topic 2: infectious diseases

On 26th December 2015 a Mysterious disease silently began to spread in a small
town in Victoria. It was identified as an outbreak of Disease X.1
People that surrounding the towns, also starting to show the same signs of illness
with a high mortality. The first symptoms of this disease is similar to Cholera, and the
treatment for cholera does not appear effective. The number of individuals being
infected by the disease is steadily increasing.
The department of Health, has written a letter to myself, as an expert in disease
control to investigate the outbreak and develop a Disease Control Strategy to
prevent further infections, with the suspected disease agent. I quickly had a number
of patient samples sent to the Institute Pasteur in Lyon, France. The World Health
Organization collaborating Centre, confirmed that the causative agent of the agent
was Disease X.
The first recommendation that I can give is practice of personal hygiene. Then for
doctor, nurse and hospital staff need a special instruction procedures put in place
when handing items that may have come in contact with an infected person’s blood
or body fluids and also handling the body of someone who has died without any
PPE,2 and the last recommendation for patient and their family is by setting up a
triage area in hospital for patient who already infected by the virus and to reduce the
risk of transmission to the person who haven’t been infected with this disease, with a
facilitation of family meeting area that divided into two room with a thick glass as a
barrier and put a small phone to the two rooms.3
Disease X is a virus that closely related to Ebola Virus family. This disease can
transmitted through human to human contact and human and non-human contact.
The symptoms of this disease can be show up from 2 to 21 days after a person get
infections but mostly it between day 8 and 10, the symptom are high fever, severe
headache, muscle pain, weakness, fatigue, diarrhoea and vomiting.4
To prevent this disease, I’m going to have collaboration with hospital to make a
socialisation due to a practice of personal hygiene to the family and people who don’t
infected with this disease, and provide a bottle of hand sanitizer or soap and a
bucket of water in front of their door on every house so when a guest come to their
home they can use a little bit of hand sanitizer, wash their foot, this is performed after
touching contaminated items before come in to someone house. This
recommendation is really impact the economic and environmental area because its
need a lot of money to make this recommendation come true and on the

1
Task Sheet
2
Nayak (2018). Ebola virus disease [ bio project ]. [online] Slideshare.net. Available at:
https://www.slideshare.net/bichitranayak/ebola-virus-disease-bio-project [Accessed 26 Jun. 2018].
3
WHO_EVD_Manual_ECU_15.1_eng.pdf
4
Cdc.gov. (2018). Signs and Symptoms | Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever | CDC. [online] Available at:
https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/symptoms/index.html [Accessed 26 Jun. 2018].
environmental impact it can make the environmental of someone house become
dirty. But for the economic impact we can manage them by making a fundraising so
half of the money is from the council and some of them is from the community. The
reason I’m doing this is to prevent the spread of this disease towards the non-
infected people.
For doctor nurse and hospital staff, I’m going to suggest that they need a special
instruction procedure put in place when handing items that may have come in
contact with an infected person’s blood or body fluids and also handling the body of
someone who has died without any PPE.
If the staff or a doctor and nurse going to the triage area for treatment area for the
patient of this disease they need to use a PPE to protect them and discharge their
personal thing from their body, and after using this they need to burn them in one
area in the back of the triage area, and for the spills that come out form the patient
they need to use a bleach to clean it. This recommendation can impacted the ethical
area because some of the family member will think the doctor and nurse doesn’t
want to take care their family member who has get infected with this disease but we
try to manage this by make a socialisation toward them or talk one on one so they
can know the reason behind this action, and also this recommendation can impacted
the environmental area because when burn the infected thing from the patient or
burn the PPE from the hospital staff the smoke that release to the sky can make air
pollution. The reason I’m doing this recommendation towards the hospital staff nurse
and doctor, I don’t want them get infected by this disease.
The last recommendation is patient and their family is by setting up a triage area in
hospital for patient who already infected by the virus and to reduce the risk of
transmission to the person who haven’t been infected with this disease, with a
facilitation of family meeting area that divided into two room with a thick glass as a
barrier and put the small phone in the two rooms. Doing it by set up a separate triage
area for patient, doctor, nurse and hospital staff and meeting area with family. This
recommendation is really promising but has a lot of impact on the economic area
because it takes a lot of money to use to build this triage area, but we can manage
them to make the small triage area first, and have cooperation with big hospital that
has good facilitation to supply this small triage area and also it can impact the
economic area because it need a lot of money to buy the technology for family
meeting area, but we can manage it by using a string tin can phone before buying
the new technology staff, so the patient and their family can hear the voice each
other.
In conclusion, the spread of this disease can be prevented by a lot of way but it can
takes a lot of money and time.