Human Connections

Work #1 - An Oxygen Molecule's Journey During Respiration:

My first piece of work is my quiz answer about the journey of an oxygen molecule through the human body during respiration, which shows my mastery of the course objective because it demonstrates how oxygen is used within the human body and why it is so important to us as humans.

Path of oxygen molecule through the human body during respiration:

An oxygen molecule inhaled through the nose first travels to pharynx or the back of the throat. It then goes past the epiglottis tissue and into the larynx, where the vocal cords are, before travelling down the trachea. Once in the lungs, it will travel down one of the two primary bronchi, which split into smaller secondary bronchi, before splitting again into even smaller bronchioles. After traveling down one of these paths, the oxygen molecule will enter into an alveoli at the end of the bronchioles. Here it passes through the very thin-walled capillaries and becomes attached to a red blood cell. Now within the blood vessels, the oxygen molecule will be taken by the red blood cell back to the heart through the pulmonary vein. Here it will enter into the left atrium, pass through the valve into the left ventricle, before leaving the heart through the aorta. Travelling through an artery leaving the heart, the artery will split into smaller arterioles where the red blood cell will take a path. The arterioles will split as well, this time into even smaller capillaries of which the red blood cell will take another path. Upon arriving at the cells of an organ, such as the liver, the red blood cell and oxygen will split, with the red blood cell making its way back to the heart while the oxygen passes through the thin-walled membrane of a cell where it will be used by that cell for cellular respiration.

Work #2 - Eradication of Smallpox:

My second piece of work is my quiz answer about the eradication of the disease smallpox, which shows my mastery of the course objective because it shows the incredible ingenuity of humans and how we as a species developed variolation/inoculation techniques and vaccines, and that we were even able to eradicate a disease.

Small pox was a highly infections and dangerous disease that was with humans for at least thousands of years. About two to five days after becoming infected with smallpox, a person would have flu-like symptoms that would last for about a week. Around this time a rash would begin to form that would spread throughout the body, which would cause three-dimensional inflammation on the skin with puss-filled structures hardening called poxes. These poxes would be very painful and itchy. It would also cause extensive scarring, as well as blood pressure drops, blindness, and could send the person into shock and potentially killing them. By the 8th century in Ancient China a practice of variolation or inoculation began in which people would cut off the poxes and collect the puss from individuals with a more minor, less deadly form of the virus and spread them on the skin of healthy individuals. Doing this would allow the healthy person's body to develop a resistance to both the more minor and more major forms of smallpox. By the 18th century this practice had also been used in many other places around the world including Europe. One British physician, Edward Jenner, who had heard an old rural legend that milkmaids who got cowpox from milking a cow would become resistant to smallpox, tried inoculating people with cowpox. This experiment was highly effective and became known as a vaccine against smallpox. Later, during the 20th century, specifically the 1960's, more effective forms of vaccines against smallpox had been developed and most of the developed world was vaccinated against smallpox, but many developing countries, particularly more tropical countries, largely had not been vaccinated. So the World Health Organization began a "war" against smallpox in which they vaccinated the entire world against smallpox. By 1977 the last natural case of smallpox occurred, and since then the disease has been eradicated.