Talk:Infectious disease

CDC and USAMRIID
It is something of a shame that the article does not mention the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases where I work. If nobody objects I'll add links for those to the "see also" if nobody else does -- assuming people agree that it's relevant. BiologistBabe (talk) 17:38, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Merge Infection to Infectious disease
I think these articles are too similar in scope to justify being two separate articles. Substantial parts of the contents are duplicative. The only difference I see is that infection may also refer specifically to the transmission part where the pathogen first comes into contact with the host and invades, but there is already a Transmission (medicine) article which can deal with that matter. Any difference can be explained in the target article. The Infectious disease is more specific, and the one with the ICD-code box, so I think it's the most appropriate target. Mikael Häggström (talk) 13:51, 13 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Makes sense to me. Both articles are Top-importance, but this is B-class while Infection is C-class, so this should be the main basis for the merged article. Probably needs flagging at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine to generate more response. LeadSongDog  come howl!  21:52, 29 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Would merge infectious disease to infection. Not all infections are currently causing disease and infection is more commonly used / shorter. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:35, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I think we may need three articles, not one:


 * An article for the medical specialty, Infectious disease (medical specialty)
 * An article about the very specific 'thing' that is called infection by microbiologists. In viruses, this is the moment when the virus's genome is integrated into the host cell's genome; I don't know what the technical definition is for cellular pathogens.
 * An article about the state of one organism (person, plant, animal, etc.) hosting another organism, whether this produces symptoms ("infectious disease") or not. It might be desirable to split this into two, with one being the "disease (or future disease)" model and another being those infections that never cause any sort of symptoms.

I thought that we had articles that made these sorts of distinctions, but that was several years ago, and it's possible that enough slow drift has resulted in some of these concepts disappearing and all of the remaining stuff being largely duplicated. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:31, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Would support move of most content from infectious disease to infection (ie pathogens, pathogenesis) and retain this article with a focus on the speciality. LT910001 (talk) 00:13, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, I second . Create infectious disease (medical speciality) article. Retain infectious disease (and possible redirect pathogen content there). Retain infection (with tag). Opinions? ~


 * I'm all right with having the merge go in the opposite direction, that is, Infectious disease being merged to Infection. The amount of content about the medical specialty of infectious disease seems to be 0 for the moment, so I think it can be added as a section in that Infection article and be forked to a separate article at a later time when having grown enough. The instance of one organism hosting another organism seems to belong to Endobiosis, which can possibly be a separate stub to describe both Endosymbiosisand endobiosis of potentially harmful effects. Mikael Häggström (talk) 23:07, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I performed the merge now. It wasn't hard, since the section organisation was basically identical, with "classification", "symptoms", "diagnosis", "treatment", "prevention" etc, saying essentially the same thing. Mikael Häggström (talk) 23:34, 27 November 2013 (UTC)