infectious diseases
Sign in to saveAlso known as infectious disease medicine, infectiology, infectious diseases (medical specialty)
medical specialty dealing with the diagnosis, control and treatment of infections
Key facts
- Synonym
- Infectiology, infectious medicine, ID
- Significant diseases
- Infections , e.g. osteomyelitis , pneumonia , tuberculosis , COVID-19 , HIV/AIDS , influenza , also public health issues e.g. epidemics , antimicrobial resistance , bioterrorism
- Significant tests
- Gram staining , microbiological cultures (including blood cultures ), serological tests , genotyping , polymerase chain reaction (PCR) , medical imaging
- Specialist
- Infectious diseases specialist, Infectiologist, Infectionist
- Glossary
- Glossary of medicine
via Wikipedia infobox
Research
1,171,655 papers- Emerging Infectious Diseases.The Nursing clinics of North America · 2019
- Infectious diseases.Current opinion in pulmonary medicine · 2004
- Infectious diseases.IARC scientific publications · 2011
- Imported Infectious Diseases, Tropical Diseases and Local Endemic Infectious Diseases in Japan.The Pediatric infectious disease journal · 2022
- Infectious diseases.Current opinion in pulmonary medicine · 2006
via PubMed
~9 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Infectious diseases (ID), also known as infectiology, is a medical specialty dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of infections. An infectious diseases specialist's practice consists of managing nosocomial (healthcare-acquired) infections or community-acquired infections. An ID specialist investigates and determines the cause of a disease (bacteria, virus, parasite, fungus or prions). Once the cause is known, an ID specialist can then run various tests to determine the best drug to treat the disease. While infectious diseases have always been around, the infectious disease specialty did not exist until the late 1900s after scientists and physicians in the 19th century paved the way with research on the sources of infectious disease and the development of vaccines.
Scope
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “infectious diseases” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.