Untitled Quiz

Epidemiology involves describing the who, what, when, where, and why/how of an event, aiming for comprehensiveness like reporting a newspaper story.
Epidemiologists use synonyms for the 5Ws (what, who, where, when, why) to describe an event, from large pandemics to local increases in accidents.
Descriptive epidemiology covers time, place, and person.

Epidemiologists become very familiar with data, understanding its variables, limitations, and variations.
Epidemiologists can learn details about a health problem in a population, such as specific neighbourhoods, months, or groups of people.
Detailed descriptions of health in a population create tables, graphs, maps, which are easily communicated, along with identifying high-risk areas or groups within the population that could help find causes of the problem.

Occurrence of disease can change over time.
Regular occurrences- anticipated by officials, like influenza or West Nile virus.
Seasonal occurrences- expected in certain seasons like influenza in winter.
Sporadic occurrences- unpredictable, like Hepatitis B.
Time scale can range from minutes, hours, to days, months, and even decades.
Examples- chronic diseases, foodborne outbreaks.

Insight into geographic extent of health problems and variability.
Relates to location of residence, diagnosis, or reporting and geographic locations relevant to the disease.
Includes birthplace, place of employment, school districts, hospital units, and urban/rural or domestic/foreign categories.
Large area of a country, continent, or a smaller category like a street address or hospital wing.

Personal characteristics are factors in illness.
Inherent or acquired characteristics of people (age, sex, race)
Biological attributes (immune, genetic)
Acquired traits like marital status, activities (occupation, leisure and use of medications/tobacco/drugs) and socioeconomic status.
Data is displayed in tables or graphs.

The most important person attribute because health-related events commonly vary with age.
Susceptibility, exposure opportunity, latency and physiologic response are age-dependent factors.
Age groups are often used for detailed understanding of disease patterns.
Chronic diseases may benefit from 10-year or 5-year age groups.

Males generally have higher illness and death rates for various diseases.
Genetic, hormonal, anatomic or other biological differences may explain different susceptibilities or physiologic responses to some diseases.

Differences in susceptibility, exposure, and other factors (like socioeconomic status and health care access) should be considered.
Some diseases are more or less common in different ethnic or racial groups.

This is a difficult variable to measure.
Relevant variables to include are occupation, income, education, and social standing.

Epidemiologists are interested in the cause of diseases and in preventative measures to minimize adverse health outcomes.
They develop and conduct studies on risks of diseases and the effect of interventions.
Public health officials depend on epidemiology in order to understand risk, prevent occurrence, characterize distributions, investigate, and monitor.