Parotid gland
Mumps is seen to be a common cause of parotid gland swelling - 85% of cases occur in children younger than 15 years. The disease is highly contagious and spreads by airborne droplets from salivary, nasal, and urinary secretions. Symptoms include oedema in the area, trismus as well as otalgia. The lesion tends to begin on one side of the face and eventually becomes bilateral. The transmission of the paramyxovirus is by contact with the infected persons saliva. Initial symptoms tend to be a headache and fever. Mumps is not fatal, however further complications can include swelling of the ovaries or the testes. Diagnosis of mumps is confirmed through viral serology, management of the condition includes hydration and good oral hygiene of the patient requiring excellent motivation. However, since the development of the mumps vaccine, given at the age of between 4–6 years, the incidence of this viral infection has greatly reduced. This vaccine has reduced the incidence by 99%.
Tropical medicine
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious bacterial disease that can affect any part of the body, though it primarily affects the lungs. It is a disease that affects the poor and weak, and is far more common in developing countries. TB can either be in its latent or active form. TB can be latent for years, sometimes over a decade. Though TB research receives a mere 1/6th the funding of HIV research, the disease has killed more people in the last 200 years than any other infectious disease. According to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, an estimated 9 million people were infected with TB in the year 2013 alone. That same year 1.5 million people died from TB. Of those 1.5 million, 360,000 were HIV positive. Tuberculosis is extremely expensive to treat, and treatments are now becoming ineffective due to drug-resistant TB strains. In the year 2016, 1.3 million people died from TB. An additional 374,000 people died who were co-infected with both TB and HIV. Research has shown that if the subject is infected with HIV, the risk of latent TB becoming active TB is between 12 and 20 times higher.