In our recent discussion, we read about the principles of Hamiltonian medicine and discussed its usefulness in addressing human health problems and disease that are occurring worldwide. One of the domains that the paper mentioned and we talked about throughout the class was the microbe-to-microbe social interaction that affects the health of the human host. The “Pathogen-pathogen Interaction” paper was very interesting since I was able to learn about the impacts of the pathogen-pathogen interaction in human disease patterns and review specific examples of disease interactions.

The paper emphasized that infectious agents often do not act independently but cooperate with other pathogens to modify microbial phenotype to persist in the human host. The identified examples of pathogen-pathogen interaction are amoeba/bacteria interaction, HIV/HCV and HIV/fungal interactions, and tick-borne disease interaction. All of these identified case examples are known to impact the health of human populations in recent years.

Several pathogen-pathogen interactions show that pathogens can have significant impact on each other. Based on the pathways the pathogens interact upon one another, pathogens cause different impacts on the host. For example, one disease can promote the contagiousness of another disease by enabling them to penetrate to vulnerable area of the body. Another type of interactions between pathogens can accelerate the virulence of one another. For example, patients who are co-infected with HIV and HSV have a boosting of HIV load along with the higher providing of a portal for entry and exit of the virus.

Since the interactions between pathogens considerably impact the human health, a disease should not be considered as a distinct entity separate from other diseases. Instead, a health professional should pay attention to the syndemics model, which states that aggregation of diseases can have negative health affects, and recognize that interactions among diseases can influence the severity, transmission, and diffusion of the disease within human population.