Translations:Basic Field Epi: Manual/316/en
Causes of disease include many different things. Infectious diseases will have an infectious agent as one of the causes. For example, rabies virus is the infectious agent that causes rabies. For diseases that have only one infectious cause, if the infectious agent is not present we can be confident that the disease will not occur. BUT, exposure of an animal to an infectious agent does not mean that the disease will occur.