Week 2: Workshop 1 – general principles in epidemiology
Week 2: Instructions for workshop 1
General principles in epidemiology
This is the first of 3 workshops. They are all quite different in their format of what is asked of you.
These workshops are about general skill development and are simple exercises. As our feedback resources are limited, no feedback will be provided as the learning is performed in the doing and your answers will be a reflection of the depth of your research. Make sure that when you hand it these workshops that your name and student number appears at the top of your page.
Workshop 1 has a series of questions for you to find the answers. We mark very quickly so you can keep your answers brief. Don’t bother with referencing, there are no marks for providing a reference (except for in question 1b which just shows us the source of your information in your provided hyperlink). Please only send in the answers as we know the question and we would like your report to be no more than two sides of an A4. There are no marks for format, keep it simple and quick. Please save your final version of the workshop as either a .doc or a .pdf. Upload your workshop via the link provided in the Assignments Link (left side online). (Select Workshop 1 link and look for the red button top right that says submit assignment).
A good source for general information is the online encyclopedia called Wikipedia, especially since you don’t have to provide references. Remember only use Wikipedia to help you understand a topic, it should not be used as a reference. Here is the Outbreak page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak) . Wikipedia is trying to provide references for every topic so you may find useful leads to references for your task reports.
The following part b. asks you to use a reliable source of information! Use the following website to source your answer:
About the CDC: What can I say, the Americans have lots of resources to plough into this very impressive organisation. This website is a virtual encyclopaedia of all things infectious! When I last looked there was a link to Giant African snails and Health risk!
Look under publications and Products tab in the left hand column at the CDC site, the Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal is free and will be useful for some projects. MMWR is very famous amongst people interested in infectious disease, check it out.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/ (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/)
If you are looking for some images, you can freely use those in their image bank at http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/default.asp (http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/default.asp) For the CDC link to Bioterrorism topics
https://emergency.cdc.gov/bioterrorism/ (https://emergency.cdc.gov/bioterrorism/) (http://www.bt.cdc.gov/index.asp)
You must reference a particular page from the CDC to answer this question 1b.
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vaccinations/Pages/How-vaccines-work.aspx (http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vaccinations/Pages/How-vaccines-work.aspx)
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/259407.php
(http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/259407.php)
http://ideas.health.vic.gov.au/diseases/hepatitis-c.asp(https://www2.health.vic.gov.au/publichealth/infectious-diseases/disease-information-advice/hepatitis-c) http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/suppl_1/S10.full (http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/suppl_1/S10.full)
(You can look up the word endemic at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/endemic
(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/endemic) ), use this dictionary for any other difficult words, you can even listen to the pronunciation!)
(https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/9/5/02-0477_article) or use the figure provided online where you found these workshop instructions. If using the article, enlarge the graph you will find by scrolling down to the little box on the right side (labeled ‘Figure’).
Look at the patterns of incidence for the diseases in the graph. Which diseases have a pattern consistent with endemic disease and which diseases display a possible epidemic pattern and explain your choice(s) (Hint: don’t forget some diseases may have seasonal variation and this is still classified as endemic, you only need paragraph 3 of the discussion if you need some help with this!).
(Hint: Use Google to search for “common source outbreak” and “propagated outbreak”)
If you are having trouble starting this one, try the search term -incidence (epidemiology) in Wikipedia but do not regurgitate the Wikipedia contents as we will know!