Course Objectives
From this course, students should be able to:
- Understand the fundamental measures of disease occurrence
in populations (incidence, prevalence, relative risk, absolute risk, incidence
rates, mortality rates)
- Explain methods to perform an investigation of a disease outbreak
in a community
- Apply concepts of disease variation in time, person and place to the
understanding of disease in populations
- Explain the relative strengths and limitations of different strategies
to study the association between risk factors (or exposures) and disease
in populations
- Evaluate major sources of random and nonrandom error in community
health studies
- Explain methods to control for sources of error
- Apply the criteria for causality to a body of literature providing
evidence for an association between population exposures and disease
- Weigh the evidence that an observed association between exposure and
disease is causal
- Understand the strategies available to evaluate the effectiveness
of a public health intervention program
- Appreciate some of the complexities in applying scientific evidence
to the making of public health policy
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