Introduction to epidemiology

What is epidemiology? This 5-day introductory course (which can be combined with a 3-day introduction to biostatistics) will give an answer to this question. This is done by familiarizing participants with:

• The epidemiological approach, uses of epidemiology, tasks of epidemiology in public health and the concept of causality.
• Principles of epidemiological surveillance.
• Characteristics of the various types of epidemiological study designs: case report/series, cross-sectional survey, surveillance, ecological study, cross-sectional comparative study, case-control study, cohort study, randomized controlled trial, field trial, community trial.
• Random error (reliability) and systematic error (validity).
• Sources of bias in epidemiological research (selection bias, information bias, bias due to confounding) and methods to control for confounding.
• Epidemiological measures of disease frequency (prevalence, incidence rate, cumulative incidence, mortality rate) and measures of the strength of the association of disease with other factors (risk difference, attributable fraction (exposed), population attributable risk, relative risk and odds ratio).