Epidemiology Assignment 1Q1) Incidence: – the number of newly registered cases of the disease in a period of time for a defined population.
It is used to show the risk of becoming ill in the population, also could be used to assist the risk of developing disease or condition, we can use incidence rate as a guide to discovering and establishing disease etiology. An example of an incidence is the morbidity rate which reflects the number of new cases that newly have the disease of the number of total populations who is in a risk of that disease. Prevalence: – the number of existing cases of a disease in a defined population at a specific period or point of time. Actually, it shows the probability of this population to be ill, in addition of that it helps to measure the burden of the disease on the community and how can the health services be modulated depending on the result. Both of them are useful to see the effect of a disease on the population and what’s the future planning that can be done to minimize its effect if it has a negative., a good example of prevalence is that until July 2017 there are 13 cases of lungs cancer per 1000 person in Glasgow city or 1.
3% of the Glasgow population have lung cancer , for the incidence it will be said that 3 new cases were founded by the end of 2017 in Glasgow. Q2) As time passing several changes are expected to happen to the population characteristics, in particular, the birth, death and the growth rate. One country could change between having a high birth and death rate and low growth rate ( spike shape ) or a low birth, death, and growth rate (barrel shape ) or a( wedge shape) which reflect a high birth rate and growth and low death rate. These shapes can be founded on the population pyramids of that country. These changes could be correlated to the increased of the public awareness including, family planning. Treatment advancements and novel public health measures will lead to longer life estimates and a better quality of life.Q3) Routine data can be collected from several sources, one of them is the population censuses. it is a comprehensive data collecting approach that covers almost the entire population.
Three sorts of data usually are collected demographic, social and economic data that represent almost the whole population on a specific time., these censuses Usually carried out periodically i.e. The UK government implement it every 10 years and reflect a wide spectrum of data and characteristic. In addition to that, it provides accurate and precise dominator counts for the population. However, it is expensive, also it is time-consuming methods and it required manpower, limited health data such as mortality and the cause of death could not be approached from the census. Moreover, while collecting data household head could give a fails information which may affect the accuracy of the data, finally, data is constantly changing so the latest update could not be obtained Civil registration in the community could also help in collecting data an example of these type of data; the fertility rates, life expectancy, mortality rates, and cause of death descriptors.
The advantages that these data are the most common and reliable data, which also can be linked to sex, education, occupation and geographical region. In contrast, it does not give the gestational age and birth weight, and it does not include any socio-economic indicator. Noteworthy, Civil registration is barely completed and collected in low-income countries or who lives under poverty line such as Palestine. Q4) It is a ratio, that represents the change of the mortality rate for a defined population. usually, it is calculated by dividing the observed number of deaths in a study population, on the expected numbers of deaths that we obtained from a standers population based on the age-specific rate.
Standers Population has the same age group of the study population. All multiply by 100. If the result is more than 1 then there is excess death in the study population.
