Genetic Screening and Counselling: Implications for Public Health as Tools for Interventions in Obesity and Diabetes

A disease is any condition that affects the normal functioning of one or more systems in an organism. In other words, it may be described as any condition that impairs normal body function(s). Diseases are a lack of a healthy state of life, a disorder or illness caused by infections rather than by accident. Medically disease is defined as any deviation from or interruptions of the normal structure or function of any body part, organ or system that is manifested by a characteristic set of symptoms and signs and whose etiology, pathology and prognosis may be known or unknown. Disease is said to have caused over three hundred million illnesses and over five million deaths against accident and other causes of death. For being the number one killer, conquering diseases is given premium in the scale of preference of the quest to conquer nature in human search for reliable knowledge which is the core concern of scientific investigations. Diseases may be caused by several factors originating from external or exogenous sources such as microbial – related or infections diseases, or internal dysfunctions such as autoimmune diseases. Other non-infectious diseases include cancer, most heart diseases, genetic diseases such as sickle cell aneamia, albinism, down syndrome.