Chapter Three: Abstract & Reflection

Chapter Three: Abstract
Chapter 3 discussed epidemiology in detail. Epidemiology is sometimes referred to as population medicine. It can be defined as "the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events in specified populations, and the application of this study to control health problems." What an epidemiologist is concerned with is determining the course of disease in a population and is defined as "an investigator who studies the occurrence of disease or other health-related conditions or events in defined populations."

The chapter discusses epidemics and endemic diseases. An epidemic is any unexpectedly large number of cases of an illness or health-related event, while an endemic disease is a disease that occurs in a population as a matter of course. Some examples of epidemics are the bubonic plague which first affects rodents, and West Nile fever virus which first affects birds. An epidemic that is widespread either around a continent or around the world is called a pandemic. There was an influenza pandemic of 1918 which spread simultaneously through Asia, Europe, and North America. A brief history of epidemiology includes the names of Hippocrates, De. Benjamin Rush, and John Snow. Incidence Rates are a measurement of the number of new cases of disease, injury, or death in a population over a given period of time. Prevalence rate measure all cases. An attack rate is a special kind of incidence rate used for a single outbreak. Cases of certain disease, called notifiable or reportable diseases, are reported by doctors, clinics, medical laboratories, and hospitals to local health agencies. These agencies then report them to state agencies, who then forward the data to the CDC. These reports assist epidemiologists who study disease trends. Lastly the chapter discussed the different types of studies used by epidemiologists including case/control studies, cohort studies, and experimental studies.


Chapter Three: Reflection
Upon discussing chapter 3 in class, the Great Team Eight found the chapter to be almost too much to digest. There was so much information and so many terms that it was hard to process, but after breaking it down, it became much clearer. One part of our discussion of the chapter covered the difficulty that epidemiologists must face when trying to get accurate data from surveys because people tend to lie while taking them. We reminisced back to high school when we all remembered taking the survey which asked us question about drug and alcohol use, study habits, guns, and many other things as well. We all recalled lying on the survey and not taking it seriously. We couldn't imagine the difficulty people must face when attempting to weed out the bogus surveys from the ones which were taken seriously. We discussed a lot of terms in class as well. We went over age-adjusted rates because we previously didn't know that they adjusted the age rate of populations in order to receive accurate data. Overall, we found the chapter very informative and although it contained a lot of terms to take in all at once, it's good that we are now familiar with them.