Epidemiology Catch all
As in malaria, viral encephalitis, and Lyme disease, an anthropod (e.g., mosquito, flea, tick, lice) conveys the infection agent.
What is vector-borne transmission?
The organism having the exposure and then the disease.
What is the host?
The manner in which the disease moves to a new host.
What is the mode of transmission?
If primary prevention is used during prepathogenesis or incubation stage, then this level of prevention is used when the host begins to react to the agent or in the pathogenesis stage.
What is secondary prevention
Total deaths of infants in given year in population/ Total # of live births in same year in population
What is infant death rate
This occurs when a pathogen such as cholera or shigellosis is carried in drinking water, swimming pools, streams, or lakes used for swimming
What is vehicle-borne transmission?
Any substance that can cause death, disease, or biological malfunction in a living organism
What is the agent?
This involves contact between a person with the disease and another person.
What is direct transmission?
This level of prevention may include rehabilitation or palliative care
What is tertiary prevention?
The cardiovascular prospective cohort study was launched in 1948 in Framingham, Massachusetts and spanned 30 years with >5,000 participants, identifying much of what we know today about the effects of diet, exercise, and common medications such as asprin on heart disease.
What is the Framingham Heart Study?
Who, what, where, when, person, place, and time.
What are questions answered by epidemiological studies?
According to the epidemiology model, this is needed for disease to happen?
What is the interaction of the agent, host, and environment
Touching, skin to skin contact, and sexual intercourse.
What are types of direct transmission?
Reasonable evidence there is a connection between an agent and disease.
What is association?
Number of new cases of a disease in population in given time vs. prevalence, which is the number of people in the population with the disease at one point in time
What is incidence
Surveillance, screening, outbreak investigation, assessment of causation
What are 4 core public health processes used in epidemiology?
This can move between an agent and host, causing spread of the disease.
What is a vector? ie a tick or mosquito
Using 1853 death rates across districts in London, John Snow created comparison tables on mortality by source of water by subdistricts showing that deaths rates in areas below the sewage inlets were very high.
What is showing that Cholera was a waterborne disease that traveled in both surface and groundwater supplies?
Interpretation is critical and is based on strength of association, consistency, temporality, biological plausibility, and concentration gradient
What is causation?
Total deaths from a specific cause in a year in a population subgroup/ Average total population subgroup for the same year
What is specific mortality rates?
These epidemics arise from infections transmitted from one infected person to another vs. common-source epidemics arise from a specific source
What are propagated epidemics?
Breaking at least one of the sides of the triangle--disrupting the connection between the environment, the host, and the agent, and stopping the continuation of disease
What is the goal of an epidemiologist?
The unknown transmission mode of HIV in the 1980s led to this positive commonly used medical precaution.
What are universal precautions?
A mother's exposure to rubella virus (Rubivirus) is necessary for rubella to occur, but exposure to rubella virus alone is not the only cause
What is necessary cause?
Total deaths from any cause in a given year in a population/ Average total population for the same year
What is crude mortality rate?