Objectives and requirement:

Medical Microbiology is one of basic courses in medicine, and it’s applied to undergraduate students in medical majors, including clinical medicine, Pharmacy, Chinese medicine, Dentistry and Nursing.

The history of human beings is a history of our fight against infectious diseases. Although we have achieved great success in the battle, a lot of microorganisms still pose a severe threat to our health nowadays. Since last century, with the wild use of antibiotics, development in modern diagnostic and therapeutic techniques, and the changes in human activities, new features of microbial infection emerged, including the dramatic increase in the opportunistic infections from endogenous normal microorganisms and traditionally non-pathogenic microorganisms, infections from drug-resistant strains getting more severe and new pathogenic microorganisms being discovered. All these make it of more importance to study Medical Microbiology.

Medical Microbiology includes three parts, bacteria, viruses and fungi which cause infectious diseases. It focuses on biological properties, pathogenicity, immunity, microbial diagnosis, specific prevention and therapy of pathogenic organisms. The most important and interesting infectious agents and diseases will be emphasized. The global impact of infectious disease will be addressed throughout the course. The goal of this course is to teach an understanding of the language and concepts of microbiology and infectious disease. The expectations of students learning the subject are understanding and mastering basic theory, knowledge and technology of microbiology as a necessary and an important knowledge background of clinical medicine. Students are asked to learn general biology, biochemistry and immunology before learning medical microbiology in order to have a basis of majoring more subjects like molecular biology, genetics and clinical infectious diseases and other related infections.

Classes include lectures as well as practical sessions. The lectures cover topics such as etiology, epidemiology, host defenses, diagnosis, identification, prevention, and control for each microbe. Based on lots of points of knowledge, experiments for students are designed with link of theoretical and practical courses in order to deepen or help remembering. 

Credit: 3.5