Lab Day 1 – Meeting Stan Before beginning work, we recommend having the students complete and sign the Laboratory Safety Statement from the American Society or Microbiology to reinforce the idea that working with microorganisms should be taken seriously. Next, the students will learn about drug resistance and the challenges of diagnosing and treating antibiotic resistant
Learning About Viruses, Epidemics, and Ebola for Middle School The purpose of these six lessons is to provide middle school students with a basic understanding of how viruses cause disease, how infectious diseases spread to become epidemics, and the challenges of bringing an epidemic under control, all from the perspective of the Ebola virus and
Epidemics: Ebola The five lessons of the Epidemics: Ebola unit can be used as a stand alone or as a supplement to the Great Diseases Infectious Disease (ID) curriculum. The purpose of these lessons is to provide high school students with a basic understanding of how viruses cause disease, how infectious diseases spread to become epidemics
How do we get better? In earlier units we discussed how the immune system provides different ‘layers’ of protection focusing mainly on immune barriers. Now we will turn our attention to how innate and adaptive immunity function. We will simplify the processes of innate and adaptive immunity into two stages, recognition and response. So far
Case Study 1: What is this mysterious disease? This case study examines the earliest reports of what we now know were AIDS cases. The medical community was perplexed and the public was scared because the cause of this disease and mode of transmission were not understood. Students will use the data provided to think about
How do pathogens make us sick? In the previous unit, we focused on adaptations and situations that contribute to microbes being pathogenic. We emphasized the idea that pathogenicity is a host–microbe interaction and that highly pathogenic microbes have adaptations that make them virulent. In this unit we will explore how an infection leads to symptoms
When does a microbe become pathogenic? Up until now we have focused on identifying infectious diseases. In this unit we turn our focus to the question: When does a microbe become pathogenic? At the heart of this question is the idea that most microbes are not pathogenic. For example, we live in a microbe -filled
What does it mean to be an infectious disease? In Unit 1, the students learned that infectious agents like bacteria, viruses, and parasites can cause infectious diseases. Students also saw that infectious diseases have wide reaching impacts on both individuals and society. Now we are going to focus on how infectious diseases are identified. Contrary
Why should we care about infectious diseases? The goal of this unit is to improve students’ understanding on the impact that infectious diseases had and still have on societies, and to introduce the factors responsible for infectious diseases. The unit begins by engaging the students by presenting the impact of infectious diseases from historical and
The Infectious Disease (ID) module has been constructed around five key questions that an informed citizen will want answered in order to understand how infectious disease impacts them. The students will address each of these questions and then, for a final project, they will use them to understand an infectious disease of their choice. Virtual