Human Health and Disease

Human Health and Disease is the chapter NEET returns to every single year, and it is unusual in being almost entirely recall - which means the marks are there for anyone willing to hold a lot of small facts steady. It opens on what health actually is: a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being rather than the mere absence of illness, and the things that build it or wear it down. Then comes the roster of infectious diseases, which is where most of the paper's questions live - typhoid and the carrier who spread it through the kitchens of New York, pneumonia and the two bacteria behind it, the common cold that stops at the upper airway, malaria with its three parasite species and the toxin released when the red cells burst, amoebiasis, ascariasis, filariasis and ringworm, each with its own agent, its own route in and its own set of signs. The middle of the chapter is immunity: the barriers a person is born with, the defence that has to be earned by meeting a pathogen, the shape of an antibody and the five classes it comes in, active against passive, the lymphoid organs where lymphocytes are made and where they later meet antigen, and the three ways the system misfires - allergy, autoimmunity and AIDS. The chapter closes on cancer, from the loss of contact inhibition to detection and treatment, and on drug and alcohol abuse in adolescence. Four sections, sixty-eight questions, and a closing set of seventeen genuine NEET items so you can measure yourself against the real paper.