Assignment: Created Mock Epidemiology Study

Assignment: Created Mock Epidemiology Study
Assignment: Created Mock Epidemiology Study
Introduction and Alignment
This exercise will test whether you can apply first the basic principles, vocabulary, and processes you learned, both biostatistical and epidemiologic, in the first four weeks of the course, and given the practice you had with reading and responding to three different published articles in the fifth week, to actually designing a health sciences research study and writing it up in scholarly format, with all it appropriate pieces, “just as if” you had actually carried it out. Hopefully, in the future, you will have the chance to carry out such a study for real.
Upon completion of this assignment, you should be able to:
Design and write up a health research study on a diverse (in terms of ethnicity, nationality, or another factor) population. Write up each component part of the study, “just as if” you had actually carried it out yourself.
Resources
Textbook: American Psychological Association. (2017). APA Style Central. Retrieved from http://apastylecentral.apa.org
Textbook: Macha, K., & McDonough, J. P. (2012). Epidemiology for advanced nursing practice. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.
Textbook: Sullivan, L. M. (2018). Biostatistics in public health (3rd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Chapter 2 Study Designs
Chapter 3 Quantifying the Extent of Disease
Chapter 4 Summarizing Data Collected in the Sample
Chapter 6 Confidence Interval Estimates
Chapter 7 Hypothesis Testing Procedures
Chapter 8 Power and Sample Size Determination
Chapter 10 Nonparametric Tests
Introduction to Epidemiology (Lesson 1)
Section 2: Epidemiology’s Historical Evolution
Epidemiologic thinking can be traced back to Hippocrates through John Graunt, William Farr, John Snow, and others, despite the fact that epidemiology as a discipline has grown since World War II.
Some of these early and more modern thinkers’ contributions are described here.
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Epidemiology dates back over 2,500 years, to around 400 B.C.
Hippocrates attempted to explain disease recurrence using logic rather than supernatural explanations.
Hippocrates proposed that environmental and host factors such as behaviors can impact the development of disease in his article “On Airs, Waters, and Places.”
1662
John Graunt, a London haberdasher and councilman who released a groundbreaking analysis of mortality data in 1662, was another early contribution to epidemiology.
This was the first publication to quantify patterns of birth, death, and disease occurrence, highlighting gender inequities, high infant mortality, urban/rural differences, and seasonal fluctuations.
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1800
By methodically collecting and analyzing Britain’s mortality statistics, William Farr expanded on Graunt’s work.
Farr, known as the “Father of Modern Vital Statistics and Surveillance,” pioneered many of the vital statistics and illness classification procedures that are being utilized today.
He focused his efforts on gathering vital statistics, compiling and analyzing the information, and reporting to the appropriate health authorities and the broader public.
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1854
An anesthesiologist named John Snow conducted a series of experiments in London in the mid-1800s that earned him the title of “father of field epidemiology.”
Snow studied cholera epidemics twenty years before the microscope was invented, in order to figure out what caused the disease and how to prevent it from happening again.
Two of his studies will be presented in depth since they exemplify the standard sequence from descriptive epidemiology through hypothesis creation to hypothesis testing (analytic epidemiology) to application.
When a cholera epidemic erupted in London’s Golden Square in 1854, Snow undertook one of his now-famous studies.
(5) He began his inquiry by discovering where people with cholera lived and worked in this area.
On a map of the area, he noted each dwelling, as shown in Figure 1.1.
This form of map, which depicts the geographic distribution of cases, is now known as a spot map.
Figure 1.1 Cholera deaths in the Golden Square district of London, 1854. (redrawn from original)
Pumps and cholera cases are marked on a street map.
Description of the image
Snow J. Snow on cholera, Snow J. Snow on cholera, Snow J. Snow on cholera, Snow J
Humphrey Milford: Oxford University Press, London, 1936.
Snow believed that water was a source of cholera infection, therefore he recorded the locations of water pumps on his spot map and looked for a correlation between the distribution of cholera cases and the position of pumps.
More case households crowded around Pump A, the Broad Street pump, than Pump B or C, he noticed.
When he asked locals in the Golden Square area why they avoided Pump B, they said it was because it was heavily contaminated, and Pump C was too far away for most of them.
Snow concluded that the Broad Street pump (Pump A) was the principal source of water and the most likely cause of infection for most cholera patients in the Golden Square region based on this evidence.
However, he was surprised to see that no cases of cholera had been reported in a two-block area just east of the Broad Street pump.
Snow investigated and discovered a brewery with a deep well on the site.
Brewery employees drank water from this well and were given a daily dose of malt liquor.
It’s possible that having access to these uncontaminated rations explains why none of the brewery’s employees got cholera.
Snow gathered information on where people with cholera got their water to confirm that the Broad Street pump was the source of the epidemic.
The cholera sufferers all had one thing in common: they drank water from the Broad Street pump.
The handle of the pump was removed after Snow reported his findings to city officials, and the outbreak was brought to an end.
A plaque on the wall outside of the suitably named John Snow Pub commemorates the location of the pump