microbiology and parasitology ( prelims to finals)

• Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 to a wealthy British family, Florence was given social and educational opportunities not afforded to most Victorian era women.
• Most societies were male dominated, nurses were subservient to “doctors”.
• Under the umbrella of religion because of perceived causes of illnesses.
• St Vincent de Paul recognized that nursing could be a social force, helping not only the ill but also the poor, hungry, sad, and lonely.
• The nurse’s role had regressed to that of an assistant caregiver.
• The Dames de Charité was an early nursing group which later gave rise to the secular Sisters of Charity in 1633.
• It was not uncommon in ancient Persia or Babylon for a slave to be forced into nursing.
• Florence combined her intelligence and sense of humanity and began nursing in 1845.
• Medicine became a scientific endeavor and moved away from mysticism.
• The spiritual leadership of St Vincent de Paul had led to an enrichment of nursing.
• Leeuwenhoek communicated his findings to the Royal Society of London, but kept his techniques for grinding lenses and making observations a secret.
• Nursing moved from the slave quarters of wealthy families to the nunnery as well as a few schools.
• Both the Dames de Charité and the secular Sisters of Charity were led by women and served as the earliest examples of “nursing schools”.
• Women of faith would put their hearts and souls into caring for the ill to answer a higher power.
• Disease was considered an invasive demon, sin, or punishment from the gods.
• Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes were able to achieve 50-300X magnification, which enabled him to visualize a variety of bacteria and protozoa.
• A male who had specialized skills different from a nurse.
• Microbe mediated biodegradation can be used to clean-up the environment, with many fungi and genetically engineered bacteria used to affect a gradual breakdown of most toxic wastes, oil spills, pesticides, detergents, and other environmental pollutants.
• Microbes are a critical component of modern sewage treatment processes.
• Over 90% of all known species of microorganisms are either neutral or beneficial to human beings, while less than 10% are harmful in some way.
• The surface of our skin contains over 2 million microbes per square inch.
• Microbes are most common in soils, especially where there is a potential source of food.
• On average, one gram of soil harbors more than 10 million microbes.
• The air that we breathe contains 50-100 microbes per cubic foot.
• Nurses had no knowledge of disease or any of the medical knowledge of today, it was the very act of caring for an individual that was the essence of their practice.
• Microorganisms are ubiquitous and abundant in the world around us, inhabiting the air we breathe, the food and water we eat and drink, the ground we walk on, and our bodies.
• Eukaryotes possess a complex cellular structure, contain membrane-bound organelles such as mitochondria, lysosomes, endoplasmic reticulum and golgi bodies, and are most noted for their negative impact on the human lifestyle.
• A human being consists of approximately 100 trillion cells, of which only 10% are mammalian in origin and the remaining 90% are microbes and together weigh about one-quarter of a pound.
• Microorganisms have developed some extraordinary survival adaptations that enable them to exist in a wide range of environments.
• Microorganisms are most commonly associated with their ability to cause disease.
• Microbiologists study cell structure and function, physiology, characteristics that may cause disease, genetics, immunology, biochemistry, epidemiology, ecology, food microbiology, dairy microbiology, and aquatic microbiology.
• Slaves were considered property and their role in nursing was to serve and obey.
• The typical size of a prokaryote is about 1um diameter.
• Many microorganisms form cysts or spores when the food or water source disappears, enabling them to exist in a dormant state for years until the environment becomes more favorable.
• As civilization progressed through thousands of years, new ideas and social constructs began to have an impact on nursing.
• A single gram of fecal material contains over 100 billion bacteria.
• Prokaryotes include the bacteria and cyanobacteria, which were formerly classified as blue-green algae, and possess a simple make-up that does not contain sub-cellular organelles.
• Anthrax is common disease but can also be transmitted to humans.
• Robert Koch proposed 4 postulates that could be used to prove whether or not an infectious agent is the cause of a disease: the causative agent must be present in every case of the disease and absent in healthy animals, the agent of disease can be isolated from the diseased animal and can be grown in pure culture, the disease can be reproduced by inoculating a portion of the pure culture into healthy animals, and the agent of disease can be re-isolated from the infected animal.
• Robert Koch established that a specific bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, was the cause of the disease in mammals.