Sickness

Abstract

Sickness behavior represents a centrally organized suite of behaviors – depression, inactivity, anorexia, sleepiness, and reduction of grooming – that evolved in animals living in nature to conserve body resources for the high energetic costs of fever in fighting infections. The domestic scene reveals that sickness behaviors can be an early marker of infections such as mastitis in cows. Aspects of sickness behavior are markers of stressful situations such as separating a young animal from its mother. In husbandry of animals that are pets, farm animals or in zoos, markers of sickness behavior are indications of infection, or stress and impaired welfare.

This article will be so flexible that, both plant animal and human will be discussed using examples, and the natural sickness common to man and animal shall be used thereby relating at the end to how sickness is to other aspect of life. 

Sickness behavior

The term “sickness behavior” appears in two divergent contexts in the 20th century. It appears to have been introduced in evaluation of the sick role or illness behavior associated with people who were considered to be sick in a sociological construct by Parsons (1958). The concept was expanded to include the term sickness behavior by Twaddle (1979) who, as seen above, previously addressed the triad of disease, illness, and sickness. More recently, descriptions of the specific behavior of diseased animals and humans as it relates to the consequences of infections and host responses to endogenously produced cytokines (Hart, 1988; Dantzer et al., 1998) also used the term sickness behavior (see Section 8). In infectious diseases, sickness behavior constitutes part of the disease process; it includes biological responses that are processed and perceived in turn as subjective symptoms. In modern immune concepts of disease, Twaddle's concept of progression of disease to illness to sickness (Twaddle and Nordenfelt, 1994) could now be considered one of simultaneous events. In a classical medical model, tissue responses brought about by the actions of the infecting agent, the host's responses to them, and the symptoms produced during these processes constitute sickness or “the state of being sick or ill” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2007). In the current era and in particular in this essay, the recommended evaluation of patients with prolonged symptoms and their adverse consequences, must distinguish between the presence of an ongoing disease (active infection or ongoing tissue injury, illness, altered physiology, and sickness behavior) and an ongoing illness (illness behavior in the absence of tissue injury or apparent abnormal physiological function).

Ongoing inflammatory or infectious diseases may often be identified as such using standard laboratory tests, such as a CBC with differential, serum protein electrophoresis and assays for C-reactive protein, activation of the complement system, and quantitative determination of immunoglobulin isotypes in which test results vary from the norm in nonspecific patterns. Chronic active hepatitis C is an example of a disease manifesting sickness behavior in which these tests are consistently abnormal. In the absence of overtly abnormal findings in a person with prolonged duration of illness, it is common for practitioners to consider a psychological explanation during the clinical evaluation. Prolonged illness may follow disease initiated by infection or physical trauma, or by emotional and physical stress or by a process without apparent explanation.

Considering the above sickness illustrations, coming to the way of life, note this.  BACTERIA, FUNGI, VIRUS ALL FIRMS OF ORGANISM ARE THE FACTORS AFFECTING HUMAN IN LIFE, LEADING TO HUNGER, POVERTY, LACK, DEPRESSION, SORROW AND WHATEVER CASE, NOW ALL THIS ISSUES OF LIFE ARE THE SICKNESS WE FACE TODAY, NOT PRIMARILY HEALTH SICKNESS BUT I THIS SAME DIRECTION. MY ARTICLE WILL BE STOPPED HERE FOR OTHER VOLUME. THANKS.