Disease Detectives
These public health professionals study patterns of health and disease in populations.
Who are epidemiologists?
This is the “home” where an infectious agent normally lives.
What is a reservoir?
A characteristic, behavior, or condition that increases a person's chance of exposure to disease or severe illness.
What is a risk factor?
These cells allow the immune system to respond more quickly when it encounters a pathogen it has seen before.
What are memory cells?
In Accessing Valid & Reliable Information, this step asks you to determine who created the information, what evidence supports it, how current it is, its purpose, and whether it can be verified.
What is Step 2: Evaluate the Validity of Help and Information?
Epidemiologists track these numbers over time and location to detect changes in disease patterns.
What are case counts?
A cough or sneeze can provide an infectious agent with this link in the Chain of Infection.
What is a portal of exit?
Vaccination, handwashing, and access to healthcare are examples of these factors that can lower disease risk.
What are protective factors?
Washing your hands, covering coughs, and staying home when sick are examples of this level of disease prevention.
What are personal-level prevention strategies?
In Decision-Making, this first step requires you to identify the decision and consider the information needed before choosing an option.
What is Step 1: Pause & Think?
This is the normal or expected number of cases of a disease in a particular area.
What is the baseline?
Food, water, doorknobs, and phones can spread disease through this type of indirect transmission.
What is vehicle-borne transmission?
Age, genetics, and immune-system characteristics belong to this category of risk factors.
What are biological risk factors?
Vaccines prepare the immune system to respond more quickly by exposing it to this recognizable target or instructions for producing it.
What is an antigen?
In Analyzing Influences, identifying crowded living conditions as an environmental risk factor represents this step.
What is Step 1: Identify Influences?
This term describes a disease that is consistently present at an expected level in a particular population or area.
What is endemic?
Vaccination can help interrupt the Chain of Infection by making this final link less vulnerable to disease.
What is the susceptible host?
Crowded housing and poor air quality belong to this category of risk factors.
What are environmental risk factors?
When enough people are immune to a contagious disease that person-to-person spread becomes more difficult, this can help protect vulnerable people.
What is community/herd immunity?
In Advocacy, this step requires you to determine your main message and what you want your audience to do.
What is Step 3: Develop a Powerful Stance?
A disease has increased well above expected levels throughout one region but has not spread widely across countries or continents. This is the best classification.
What is an epidemic?
A sick student coughs into their hand, touches a shared keyboard, and another student later uses it. The keyboard represents this type of transmission.
What is indirect/vehicle-borne transmission?
Education, healthcare access, neighborhood and built environment, social/community context, and economic stability are the five major areas of this concept.
What are the Social Determinants of Health?
A city improves sanitation systems and a student washes their hands before eating. The first is this level of prevention, while the second is personal-level prevention.
What is community-level prevention?
A student compares several NERD prevention strategies based on effectiveness, which Chain of Infection link each interrupts, practicality, and how many people each could protect. This is the Decision-Making step being applied.
What is Step 2: Use a Prioritization Strategy?
Epidemiologists notice cases rising above the expected baseline in one community. Before calling it an epidemic or pandemic, they would examine these two important patterns in addition to the number of cases.
What are time and location?
A school uses handwashing, vaccination, staying home when sick, and improved ventilation instead of relying on one strategy. This prevention concept explains why.
What is layered protection/the Swiss Cheese Model?
A person lives in crowded housing and has repeated exposure to infectious disease. In Analyzing Influences, explaining how continued crowded housing could affect later disease risk represents this step.
What is Step 3: Connect Influences to the Future?
Vaccination and personal prevention behaviors are often more effective when combined with public-health strategies because disease prevention works best according to this principle.
What are layers of protection?
A poster gives accurate facts about influenza but never tells its audience what to do. It is missing the feature that separates health information from this health skill.
What is Advocacy/a call to action?