Basic Terms
The study of how disease or other health events impact specific populations within a society.
An animal that transfers an infection by bringing the infectious agent from one organism to another.
What is a vector?
Dust particles are considered this form of disease transmission.
What is indirect transmission?
This disease involved intense wet diarrhea and water loss, leading to death.
What is cholera?
Who is Florence Nightingale?
Some form of either behavioral, environmental, or genetic factor that positively influences someone's chance of having a certain health event.
What is a risk factor?
The habitat or area where an infectious agent needs to grow to survive/multiply.
What is a reservoir?
Sneezing, coughing, and talking are all ways a disease may transmit through this way.
What is airborne transmission?
This disease was made famous by a cook named Mary Mallon who gave it to at least 50 people while being a healthy carrier herself.
What is typhoid fever?
He is often known as the "Father of Epidemiology."
Who is John Snow?
A person within a population that has a specific health event or disease.
What is a case?
A type of fomite that brings the infectious agent from its reservoir to the host.
What is a vehicle?
This is when a non-living object transfers a disease to its host.
What is vehicle-borne transmission?
This disease is known for a high fever and large, mobile rash.
What is typhus?
He helped figure out the cause of anthrax in the late 1800s.
Who is Louis Pasteur?
The first "case" that an epidemiologist sees with respect to a specific health event.
What is the index case?
Someone or some animal that is recovering from a disease but can still transmit it to other hosts.
What is a convalescent carrier?
This is when a fly, flea, or other organism is needed to be used as nourishment for a pathogen on its way to a new host.
What is mechanical transmission?
This disease was found to be caused by smoking tobacco during clinical trials in the 1950s and 1960s.
What is lung cancer?
She conducted the first case-control study of women with breast cancer, and later a ten-year study of women with breast cancer.
Who is Janet Lane-Claypon?
This type of epidemic has characteristics of both common-source and propagated epidemics.
What is a mixed epidemic?
An organism that has an infectious agent within it that is occasionally contagious, depending on the time or place.
What is an intermittent carrier?
A pathogen undergoes changes before being transmitted to its new host, such as with mosquitos.
What is biological transmission?
This disease was found to have killed large amounts of sheep in the hills of Europe in the 1870s.
What is anthrax?
He made a large impact on our knowledge of worker's diseases and conditions based on his work with cesspool workers.
Who is Bernardino Ramazzini?