Childhood immunizations in the United States
Mumps is a contagious disease caused by the virus by the same name. Since most people in the United States have been vaccinated, mumps is now a rare disease in this country. Currently there are no specific treatments for mumps.
Mumps is spread person to person by droplets of saliva or mucus from the mouth, nose or throat of an infected person. This is done through coughing, sneezing, talking, and coming into contact with contaminate items. Transmission likely occurs before the salivary glands swell an up to 5 days after the swelling begins.
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.