Lifestyle & Disease - Non-Communicable Diseases: An Introduction (GCSE Biology)

Non-Communicable Diseases: An Introduction

Types of Disease

Communicable Disease

• Communicable diseases spread from one organism to another. Some types of diseases can be passed on between people. These are called communicable disease. They are caused by many different types of pathogen, and are also known as contagious or infections diseases.
• Communicable diseases can be transmitted by vectors. Vectors are often pathogens which can transmit disease from one organism to another. For example, malaria is a communicable disease which can be
  transmitted by mosquitos (the vector).

Non-communicable Disease

• Non-communicable diseases cannot be passed on to another organism. Some diseases cannot be transferred from one organisms to another. These are non-communicable diseases. They are often chronic (long-term), and examples are cancer and diabetes.
• CHD is an example of a non-communicable disease. In the previous  section we learnt about CHD, which is a key example of a non-communicable disease – you cannot pass it from person to person.

Sampling

• Sampling allows you to hypothesise based on the whole population. Populations are too large to individual take data. Therefore, you must take an accurate, representative sample of the population to draw conclusions based on the population as a whole.
• Sampling must be random. In order to get a sample that is representative of the population as a whole, it must be randomly chosen.
• Sampling can be used in epidemiology. Sampling can be used to provide health data. This can be used to look into prevalences of diseases in many different samples, such as gender.