| illness | 1. The condition of being ill, evil, or bad; badness; unfavorableness. "The illness of the weather." 2. Disease; indisposition; malady; disorder of health; sickness; as, a short or a severe illness. 3. Wrong moral conduct; wickedness. Within the present century, there has been a tendency in England to use illness in the sense of a continuous disease, disorder of health, or sickness, and to confine sickness more especially to a sense of nausea, or "sickness of the stomach." Synonym: Malady, disease, indisposition, ailment. Origin: From Ill. Source: Websters Dictionary (01 Mar 1998) |
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| illness, acute | An illness with an abrupt onset and usually a short course. (12 Dec 1998) |
| illness, chronic | An illness that has persisted for a long period of time. It is a continuing disease process. (12 Dec 1998) |
| environmental illness | A polysymptomatic condition believed by clinical ecologists to result from immune dysregulation induced by common foods, allergens, and chemicals, resulting in various physical and mental disorders. The medical community has remained largely skeptical of the existence of this "disease", given the plethora of symptoms attributed to environmental illness, the lack of reproducible laboratory abnormalities, and the use of unproven therapies to treat the condition. (12 Dec 1998) |
| functional illness | A physical disorder with no known or detectable organic basis to explain the symptoms. See: behaviour disorder, neurosis. Synonym: dynamic disease, functional disease, functional illness. (05 Mar 2000) |
| abnormalities, radiation-induced | Congenital changes in the morphology of organs produced by exposure to ionizing or non-ionizing radiation. (12 Dec 1998) |
| accidents, radiation | Accidental dispersal of radioactive materials from a radiation source. Accidents at nuclear reactors can involve large groups of the population from dispersion of radioactivity into the environment and through fallout or a few individuals with high injurious doses. (12 Dec 1998) |
| acoustic radiation | The fibres that pass from the medial geniculate body to the transverse temporal gyri of the cerebral cortex by way of the sublentiform part of the internal capsule. Synonym: radiatio acustica. (05 Mar 2000) |
| acute radiation syndrome | <syndrome> A syndrome caused by exposure of the body to large amounts of radiation, (e.g., from certain forms of therapy, accidents, and nuclear explosions; it is divided into three major forms which are, in ascending order of severity, the haematogic, gastrointestinal, and central nervous system-cardiovascular forms; its clinical manifestations are divided into prodromal, latent, overt, and recovery stages. (05 Mar 2000) |
| adaptive radiation | <chemistry> The evolution of new speciesor sub-species to fill unoccupied ecological niches. (06 May 1997) |
| alpha radiation | <physics, radiobiology> The most easily absorbable type of radiation, it consists of a stream of alpha particles, doubly ionised helium nuclei which are electrically charged and produce intense ionisation in matter. Alpha radiation can be deflected in electromagnetic fields. (09 Oct 1997) |
| annihilation radiation | The radiation resulting when a positron from beta positive decay comes to rest. It encounters an electron, and they annihilate each other and convert their rest mass into two 0.51-MeV gamma rays emitted in exactly opposite directions. (05 Mar 2000) |
| background radiation | <radiobiology> Level of environmental radation due to background sources. Background sources can be natural, such as cosmic rays and natural radioactive elements (principally radon, but including other elements such as isotopes of potassium (which people get substantial amounts of in foods like bananas)). They can also be man-made, such as from fossil-fuel combustion, everyday leakage from nuclear activities, and leftover from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. Background radiation is usually distinguished from acute radiation, such as from medical X-rays, nuclear accidents, radioisotope therapy, or other short-term doses. The man-made contribution to background radiation is quite small compared to the natural contribution, medical uses dominate human exposure to acute radiation. (09 Oct 1997) |
| beta radiation | <radiobiology> Radiant energy from a source of beta rays. (05 Mar 2000) |
| radiation | <radiobiology> Propagation of energy through space. In the context of this report, it is electromagnetic radiation (X-rays or gamma rays) or corpuscular radiation (alpha particles, electrons, protons, neutrons) capable of producing ionisation. (16 Dec 1997) |