Disease Prevention – Various Ways to Implement

Disease prevention and health promotion can be of many types. Healthcare professionals and educators usually come to disease prevention in various ways so as to meet the needs of a population. Various types of activities should be taken into consideration while planning a program to reduce the quantity and spread of illness and death from a specific disease. It is important to understand the target population and what type of disease prevention activity will create the maximum impact.

Primordial Disease Prevention

Primordial or primary prevention refers to stopping the disease before its biological onset, i.e. prior to appearance of symptoms. Examples of this are washing hands or immunization. In both the cases, the disease hasn’t yet attacked the target population; however prevention measures are taken before its occurrence. Some situations where primary prevention should be administered are if the target audience is engaged in a high risk activity, if there are any chances if they would change it and which tools they would need to change it.

Early Detection

Early detection of the disease is also a type of disease prevention and is known as secondary prevention. Several diseases are considered as “silent”, i.e. show no symptoms. People suffering from them may not even know. Diseases included in this category are diabetes, high blood pressure and sexually transmitted diseases, and more. Secondary prevention is administered when the target population is engaged in high risk activity, and there are resources available to them to get screened. Several of such screenings are and have to be a part of the routine health checkup with the patient’s primary healthcare provider. However, a lot of screening opportunities are available in societies where people can access public health services. Screenings make a perfect way of getting a captive audience for education. When an individual is diagnosed with a certain disease, the correct referral, awareness and treatment can be imparted, whereby disease progression can be slowed down or stopped.

Diagnosis

Upon the definite diagnosis of a disease too, disease prevention can be administered, and at this stage it is called tertiary prevention. Its goal is stopping complications of the disease. E.g. if a patient is diagnosed with diabetes, s/he is at more risk to eye diseases like cataract, kidney diseases and heart conditions. Tertiary prevention would therefore include making the patient educated about how to properly manage her/his diabetes, eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly so that s/he can keep the disease under control. If such a tertiary prevention is administered successfully, there would be no complications out of the disease.