Rare Diseases You Should Know About: Insights for Certified Nursing Assistant Training Programs

The fact that a disease is rare doesn’t mean you’re never going to come across it and when you’re in a certified nursing assistant training program, it’s very important to get an understanding of what makes an illness rare and why you need to know how to identify it throughout your career. You could take something like the disease caused by Yersinia pestis and assume you’re never going to see a real-world instance of it in your life because most people believe it disappeared hundreds of years ago, but that’s not true. The actuality of this pandemic, also known as the Black Death, is that it’s still around and it still afflicts people to this day.

Doctor at Work

No matter how few instances of disease are reported or recorded, it’s important to be able to identify them so you know how to treat them and stop their spread as soon as they show up at your practice. Every certified nursing assistant training program should have the ability to teach you to find rare diseases and it will always be an important part of your work. Here are some of those rare diseases and how you can identify them, no matter where you practice medicine or how far removed from them you believe humanity happens to be.

Commonly Found Rare Diseases

Muscular dystrophies cover a large group of genetic disorders, and you’ve likely heard about them many times, but they’re identified as rare diseases because only around 250,000 people in the United States are currently diagnosed with them. Sickel cell disease is another rare disorder with even fewer U.S. citizens afflicted at 100,000, but this genetic disorder can easily show up in front of you. Cystic fibrosis affects just 30,000 people nationwide, making it very rare, yet it’s common for patients to present with its symptoms.

Primary biliary cholangitis currently affects around 65,000 people out of the 342,000,000 living in the United States and it commonly presents symptoms related to more common diseases, making it more difficult to diagnose. Even though you’ve heard the term Huntington’s disease before, it’s rare at just 0.008% of the U.S. population. These diseases are all rare, but that doesn’t mean you’re never going to see them and that’s why it’s so important to identify them.

Why Rare Diseases Matter

Certified Nursing Assistants

Each disease listed above is rare, but anyone pursuing a CNA career must know them and understand how to pick them out of all other afflictions presenting the same symptoms. Simply put, rare doesn’t mean non-existent.

The more you know about rare diseases, the better equipped you’ll be to diagnose them and give your patients much better chances of surviving them. The longer these diseases persist without treatment, the worse those chances become, and you’ll run the risk of allowing some of them to spread. Always keep them in the back of your mind because you never know when a rare disease will show up at your door.