Learning Outcomes:
On completion of this module, students should be able to:
• Articulate the epidemiologic approach to the study of diseases and state its underlying assumptions about the occurrence of outcomes in the natural world.
• List, recognise and interpret the fundamental measures of disease frequency used in epidemiology and understand the centrality of denominators to epidemiologic inference.
• Distinguish between different measurement scales, categorical and continuous variables. Recognize the most common statistical tests used to compare categorical and and continuous variables.
• Explain what is meant by the term “risk factor” and interpret the most commonly used measures of effect in epidemiology. Explain why effect estimation is preferable to a simple determination of association.
• Interpret p-values and confidence intervals and explain why the latter provides more information to the reader than the former. Construct confidence intervals for basic epidemiologic measures.
• Understand the major issues in the application of diagnostic tests to veterinary medicine. They should be familiar with factors that affect sensitivity and specificity, why predictive values are more helpful in decision making than sensitivity and specificity, use a nomogram to make a clinical decision based in part, on the results of a diagnostic test and critically appraise literature validating a diagnostic test.
• Recognize the major epidemiologic study designs in the literature. Students should be able to describe their strengths and weaknesses and state which epidemiologic measures of effect can be estimated using each design.
• Define the major types of bias that occur in epidemiologic studies.
• How to critique articles in the scientific literature. Know how to determine which study-design flaws have greatest consequences to validity.
• Estimate and interpret vaccine efficacy. Understand the relationship between an infectious disease’s basic reproductive number, immunization and disease eradication.