what is a pathogen

In biology, a pathogen (Greek: πάθος pathos “suffering, passion” and -γενής -genēs “producer of”) in the oldest and broadest sense is anything that can produce disease; the term came into use in the 1880s.Typically the term is used to describe an infectious agent such as a virus, bacterium, protozoa, prion, a fungus, or other micro-organism

There are several substrates including pathways where the pathogens can invade a host. The principal pathways have different episodic time frames, but soil contamination has the longest or most persistent potential for harboring a pathogen. Diseases caused by organisms in humans are known as pathogenic diseases.