Disease!

     Disease is a horrible horrible thing that goes on everywhere in the world. As technology, and medicine are becoming more relevant, disease is slowly becoming less of an issue, but new diseases and viruses appear everyday. One of geographers jobs is to be able to track where disease have been and where they will go. How geographers do this is with mapping and lots of case studies. Two very prevalent diseases are malaria and HIV/AIDS. Both of these diseases are transmitted in different ways, malaria is a vectored infectious disease and HIV/AIDS is a non-vectored infectious disease.
     The term vectored states that the disease is transmitted by a intermediary vector. In malaria's case that vector would be the mosquito. The mosquito will sting an already infected person, suck up their parasite infected blood and the next time that mosquito stings someone, some of the parasites are injected into the new person, who then becomes infected. The mosquito is not the only type of vector. Fleas, flies, worms, snails, and many other vectors can carry disastrous diseases. On the day you read this, 3000 people will die from malaria.
    The term non-vectored disease states that the disease is transmitted through direct contact between host and victim. The touch can be very common like a handshake, or very uncommon like a sexual touch. HIV/AIDS is a disease that is transmitted primarily through sex and secondarily through needle sharing in drug use.
    Geographers track both of these disease by looking at the death rates, infant mortality rates, and the life expectancy in countries. By looking at these figures they can figure out if the disease is getting worse, or getting better. Also they can see how the disease is spreading by looking closer at specific towns and seeing if the disease is there, or if it has had any effect on humans in that area.

 Fouberg, Murphy, de Blij. Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture. 10th ed. Wiley, 2012. Print