Category — Cancer

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American tobacco farmer who got cervical cancer at the age of 30. Despite her doctors’ efforts, her case of cancer was too aggressive to control; she passed away in October 1951. But this is not the end of the story.

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In humans, cancer is not something you can catch. Cancer is a disease where your own cells divide and grow out of control. This underlies one of the major divisions between types of diseases: communicable and non-communicable diseases.

Two different types of communicable pathogens under a Gram's Stain.

Communicable disease are usually caused by a pathogen, something nasty that gets in your body and makes you sick. Pathogens can be things like bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other things. The thing that they have in common is that they are caused by an infection. This infection is something that uses you to reproduce and pass to someone else.

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