Transmissionof pathogen can occur in various ways including physical contact, contaminatedfood, body fluids, objects, airborne inhalation,

or throughvector organisms. [1] Infectious diseasesthat are especially infective are sometimes called contagious and can be easily transmitted by contact with an ill person or their secretions. Infectious diseases with more specialized routes of infection, such as vector transmission or sexual transmission, are usually regarded as contagious but do not require medicalquarantine of victims. The term infectivity describes the ability of an organism to enter, survive and multiply in the host, while the infectiousness of a disease indicates the comparative ease with which the diseaseis transmitted to other hosts An infection is notsynonymouswith an infectious disease, as someinfections do not cause illness in a host. Classification Among the almost infinite varieties of microorganisms, relatively few cause disease in otherwise healthy individuals. Infectious disease results from the interplay between those few pathogensand the defenses of the hosts they infect. The appearance and severity of disease resulting fromany pathogen depends upon the ability of that pathogen to damage the host as well as the abilityof the host to resist the pathogen. Clinicians therefore classify in fectious microorganisms or m i c r o b e s a c c o r d i n g t o t h e s t a t u s o f h o s t d e f e n s e s either as primary pathogens or as opportunistic pathogens : Primary pathogens c a u s e d i s e a s e a s a r e s u l t o f t h e i r p r e s e n c e o r a c t i v i t y w i t h i n t h e normal, healthy host, and their intrinsicvirulence(the severity of the disease they cause)is, in part, a necessary consequence of their need to reproduce and spread. Many of the most common primary pathogens of humans only infect humans, however many seriousdiseases are caused by organisms acquired from the environment or which infect non -human hosts. T r a n s m i s s i o n o f i n f e c t i o u s d i s e a s e s m a y a l s o i n v o l v e a vector . V e c t o r s m a y b e mechanical or biological. A mechanical vector picks up an infectious agent on the outside of its body and transmits it in a passive manner. An example of a mechanical vector is ahousefly,which lands on cow dung, contaminating its appendages with bacteria from the feces, and thenlands on food prior to consumption. The pathogen never enters the body of the fly.

In contrast, biological vectors harbor pathogens within their bodies and deliver pathogens to newhosts in an active manner, usually a bite. Biological vectors are often responsible for serious blood-borne diseases, s u c h a s malaria, viral encephalitis, Chagas disease, Lyme disease and African sleeping sickness. Biological vectors are usually, though not exclusively,arthropods, s u c h a s mosquitoes, ticks,fleas and lice.V e c t o r s a r e o f t e n r e q u i r e d i n t h e l i f e c yc l e o f a pathogen. A common strategy used to control vector borne infectious diseases is to interrupt thelife cycle of a pathogen by killing the vector.T h e relationship between virulence and transmission is complex, and h a s i m p o r t a n t consequences for the long term evolution of a pathogen. Since it takes many generations for amicrobe and a new host species to co-evolve, an emerging pathogen may hit its earliest victims especially hard. It is usually in the first wave of a new disease that death rates are highest. If a disease is rapidly fatal, the host may die before the microbe can get passed along to another host.However, this cost may be overwhelmed by the short term benefit of higher infectiousness if transmission is linked to virulence, as it is for instance in the case of cholera (the explosivediarrhea aids the bacterium in finding new hosts) or many respiratory infections (sneezing andcoughing create infectious aerosols ).