Human and animal diseases are often caused by viruses or bacteria. Over the past two hundred years, vaccines have eradicated some of these diseases. Others have returned to haunt humans with new and ever mutating strains or revived when vaccination programs were interrupted. Communicable diseases may spread in different ways: through blood, air, feces/urine, food, or water. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) keep constant watch over the most potentially dangerous diseases and the most likely threats to various world populations.
New diseases (such as MRSA and COVID- 19) are no longer a “possibility” for a pandemic, but they already are. As populations, when packed densely as in urban areas, there is increased risk of disease transmission. This lab will let you explore various diseases: Kold, a caricature of the common cold; Impfluenza, which resembles influenza; Neasles, with the high transmission rate of measles; and Red Death, a fast-spreading epidemic with a high mortality rate.
What factors come into play in the spread of these diseases? And what can we do to counter them?
Assienment
Most diseases begin with what is called “the virgin field”—a scenario in which humans have no natural or man-made immunity to the disease.
Procedure
I. Copy the following link for the simulation model and open in a different tab on your internet browser:
2. To see the progress of a disease in a particular community, start by predicting how many sick days will be reported when you run the Kold disease through a medium-sized population, and record your prediction in the Disease Simulation Table
3. In this first run-through, we’ll assume that the population does not move around the field; they interact with their neighbors, but the contagion cannot travel long distances. (Population Mixing remains set to None.)
4. STEP I – Make sure the Lesson is set to Virgin Field and Run the simulator to 100 days three times, recording data in your table. Note that a Kold lasts 5 days (see the Details button next to Kold). So, the number of Kold cases is roughly the simulated number of sick days divided by 5. Then answer the following questions:
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DISLASL LAB
4.l Do you get the exact same results each time? How do the results compare to each other and to your prediction?
4.2 What factors might contribute to susceptibility to the disease?
