Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Pathogen
Summary
In biology, a pathogen (πάθος, pathos "suffering", "passion" and -γενής, -genēs "producer of"), in the oldest and broadest sense, is any organism or agent that can produce disease. A pathogen may also be referred to as an infectious agent, or simply a germ.
The term pathogen came into use in the 1880s. Typically, the term pathogen is used to describe an infectious microorganism or agent, such as a virus, bacterium, protozoan, prion, viroid, or fungus. Small animals, such as helminths and insects, can also cause or transmit disease. However, these animals are usually referred to as parasites rather than pathogens. The scientific study of microscopic organisms, including microscopic pathogenic organisms, is called microbiology, while parasitology refers to the scientific study of parasites and the organisms that host them.
There are several pathways through which pathogens can invade a host. The principal pathways have different episodic time frames, but soil has the longest or most persistent potential for harboring a pathogen.
Diseases in humans that are caused by infectious agents are known as pathogenic diseases. Not all diseases are caused by pathogens, such as black lung from exposure to the pollutant coal dust, genetic disorders like sickle cell disease, and autoimmune diseases like lupus.
Pathogenicity is the potential disease-causing capacity of pathogens, involving a combination of infectivity (pathogen's ability to infect hosts) and virulence (severity of host disease). Koch's postulates are used to establish causal relationships between microbial pathogens and diseases. Whereas meningitis can be caused by a variety of bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic pathogens, cholera is only caused by some strains of Vibrio cholerae. Additionally, some pathogens may only cause disease in hosts with an immunodeficiency. These opportunistic infections often involve hospital-acquired infections among patients already combating another condition.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (12)
ENV-466: Contracts and professional responsability
A l'issue de ce cours, les étudiant-es sont capables d'analyser sous l'angle du droit privé la plupart des situations typiques de leur future pratique professionnelle. Ils/elles sont ainsi en mesure d
ENV-507: Fate and behaviour of environmental contaminants
The student will learn the important processes that control the transport and transformation of organic chemicals in the environment, as well as the formulation and solution of quantitative models to
BIO-477: Infection biology
Infectious diseases (ID) are still a major problem to human health. But how do pathogens make us sick? How do they evolve and spread? The discovery and use of antibiotics and vaccination has changed t