Reportable Diseases: Colorado vs. California

This nursing assignment delves into the comparison of reportable health conditions between Colorado and California. It highlights how the different states classify diseases based on their contagious nature and incubation periods. The assignment focuses on Varicella (chickenpox), categorized as a 7-day reportable disease in Colorado but an immediate (1-day) reportable disease in California. It emphasizes the influence of environmental factors, hygiene levels, and individual immunity on disease reporting timelines.

Running head: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
COMPARISON OF HEALTH CONDITION REPORTABLE (COLORADO AND CALIFORNIA)
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1NURSING ASSIGNMENT
Chicken pox is one of the intensively contagious disease caused by Varicella Zoster
Virus (VZV). After the onset of this disease, it causes rashes, blisters all over the patient’s body
and the patient has to suffer from itchiness, tiredness, and fever as well. the primary symptoms of
blisters appears on stomach at first and then it spreads on back, face and the entire body and
causes at least 400 to 500 itchy blisters (Gershon et al., 2015).
The Colorado department of healthcare has chosen two reportable time durations of any
kind of disease. These reportable durations are 24 hour reportable and 7 day reportable. Diseases
present in the 24 hour reportable includes tuberculosis, anthrax and other disease that can
outbreak within 24 hours and can affect huge population. Such disease can outbreak due to water
air or food pollutions. 24-hour reportable diseases contains antibiotic resistant diseases. Whereas,
the 7-days reportable diseases are Varicella, HIV and others with less or no contagious nature.
The onset of blisters of Varicella are seen after 7 to 8 days of infection and hence, these are kept
under 7-days reportable column (Richards et al., 2015).
Health condition reportable of California is little different from that of the Colorado state.
In California, varicella (causing chicken pox) has been placed under immediate or 1 day
reportable whereas in Colorado it is in 7 days reportable list. Environmental conditions, hygiene
level that aids in the immunity level of people across the state (Van Panhuis et al., 2013).
Therefore, same disease take different time to infect, colonize and outbreak symptoms in the
body. Hence, reportable time differs.

2NURSING ASSIGNMENT
References
Gershon, A. A., Breuer, J., Cohen, J. I., Cohrs, R. J., Gershon, M. D., Gilden, D., ... & Seward, J.
F. (2015). Varicella zoster virus infection. Nature reviews. Disease primers, 1, 15016.
Richards, S., Aziz, N., Bale, S., Bick, D., Das, S., Gastier-Foster, J., ... & Voelkerding, K.
(2015). Standards and guidelines for the interpretation of sequence variants: a joint
consensus recommendation of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics
and the Association for Molecular Pathology. Genetics in medicine: official journal of the
American College of Medical Genetics, 17(5), 405.
Van Panhuis, W. G., Grefenstette, J., Jung, S. Y., Chok, N. S., Cross, A., Eng, H., ... & Burke, D.
S. (2013). Contagious diseases in the United States from 1888 to the present. The New
England journal of medicine, 369(22), 2152.