Medical Microbiology

Catalog description

This course will familiarize students with the disease and health relationships between microorganisms and humans. The goal of the course is to have students understand, especially from a molecular point of view, the process by which microorganisms cause disease, virulence factors they possess, portals of entry and the consequences, host responses to disease conditions, the signs and symptoms of a disease, chemical means by which diseases can be treated, methods used for identification of pathogenic organisms and current information on pathogens and infectious diseases. Thus, this course will focus on why the biological properties of organisms are important to disease in humans and will examine etiology, epidemiology, host defenses, identification, diagnoses, prevention and control for each microbe. the course will focus on representative examples of bacterial, fungal, protozoan and viral pathogens.