In Article <3cpcn8$59s at charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>
ppappas at magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Peter W Pappas) writes:
> Eric mentions another good point, and that is that the
>definitions we are using may mean different things to different people. What's
>virulence? What's pathology? Surely, the definitions of these terms are going
>to vary among ecologists, epidemiologists, pathologists, etc., so those working
>in different areas of host-parasite relationships might have quite different
>views of such relationships.
>
This is true, but I think it is incumbent on all who use the terms
should do so with regard to conventional usage. When this discussion began I
made a point of looking up the distiniction between pathogencity and virulence
in Mausner and Baum's "Epidemiology", which I believe most regard as the
functional equivalent of "Clinical Parasitology", or Manson's "Tropical
Medicine", pathogenicity is the ability of an etiologic agent to induce
clinical disease in a host, virulence is mortality resulting from cases of
clinical disease. Virulence can be expressed as the Case Fatality Rate. As all
of us know, simple infection with a parasite is not synonomus with clinical
disease so we distinquish between infections which are asymptomatic and those
which result in disease. The terminology issue is a tricky one when
communicating accross disciplinary lines. Fortunately, we have the formal
statement of ecological terms authored by Esch et al to keep us all talking
the same language. When I speak to the anthropologists, I always have to
make sure that they understand that prevalence and incidence are not synonomus
terms, and that there is a real distiniction between infestation and infection.
**********************************
* Charles T. Faulkner * When you don't know where you're
* Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville * going any road will take you there.
* (ctfaulkn at utkvx.utk.edu) * Alice
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