Topic 1 - Intro

Epidemic

Outbreak in a community

Pandemic

Outbreak between communities

Morbidity

How many people become affected

Mortality

How many people die

Immunity

It has to be acquired, “not getting something“

Science

Looks at all evidence and draws conclusion

Pseudoscience

Draws a conclusion and then cherry-picks the evidence to support it

Public Health

Collective health

Epidemiology

concerned with the distribution and determinants of health and diseases, morbidity, injuries, disability and mortality in populations

Distribution

How something is spread out in a population

Determinants

Cause(s)

Causative agent

Source of disease: microbial, genetic, social/behavioral, environmental

Resistant

More likely to survive, genetic

Susceptibles

Vulnerable to getting a disease

Acute infection

• symptoms occur soon after infection

• infectious agent eliminated from individual after initial disease is gon

• requires large populations with continuous new supply of susceptibles

• measles, chicken pox, small pox

Chronic infection

• symptoms may never occur or do at low level

• infectious agent never eradicated from host

• usually a virus, not bacterium

• can survive in small populations

• difficult to control since hard to determine infected from uninfected

• HIV, Syphilis

Epidemiological triangle

agent, host, environment

Transmission rate

how effectively disease spreads

airborne diseases have the highest transmission rate

Mortality rate

death rate from the disease

the percentage of infected individuals that die

also applies to individual chance of survival

Natural history of a disease

course of a disease from its start to its clinical endpoint

few diseases have reached a clinical end point

Qualitative info

observations, descriptors

Quantitative info

numerical data

Three things required by humans

oxigen

water

food