Course Description
Principles and methods of epidemiology, emphasizing study design. Measures of morbidity and mortality, data sources, observational and experimental designs, data interpretation, quantitative methods for risk associations, controlling for confounding factors, and applications of epidemiology will be covered. Community health, environmental epidemiology, infectious, noninfectious and chronic disease epidemiology are considered.
Athena Title
Fundamentals of Epidemiology
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in EPID 7010, GLOB 7150
Non-Traditional Format
This course will be taught 95% or more online.
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall, spring and summer
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This core course for Master of Public Health students introduces epidemiology, with emphasis on design of epidemiological studies. The successful student should be able to calculate and apply common epidemiologic measures of disease frequency; describe and apply epidemiologic models to specific diseases; identify sources of data and discuss the advantages and limitations of such data for the study of chronic and infectious diseases; understand what is meant by reliability, validity, representativeness, generalizability, and confounding; define and discuss sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value of screening tests; discuss the strengths and limitations of case- control, cross-sectional, and cohort study designs; and identify major sources of bias and describe methods for bias reduction.
Topical Outline
1. The history and scope of epidemiology 2. Applications of epidemiology 3. Measures of morbidity and mortality 4. Descriptive epidemiology: person, place and time 5. Data sources 6. Study design: ecological, cross-sectional, case-control and cohort designs 7. Measures of effect 8. Evaluation of association 9. Data interpretation issues: bias and confounding 10. Screening for disease in the community 11. Epidemiology of infectious diseases 12. Epidemiological aspects of work and the environment 13. Genetic epidemiology 14. Psychological, behavioral, and social epidemiology
Syllabus