Essential Epidemiology

1. Epidemiology is ...; 2. How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency; 3. Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology; 4. Healthy research: study designs for public health; 5. Why? Linking exposure and disease; 6. Heads or tails?: The role of chance; 7. All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error; 8. Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding; 9. Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers; 10. Who sank the boat? Association and causation; 11. Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses; 12. Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters; 13. Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence; 14. Prevention: better than cure?; 15. Early detection: what benefits at what cost?; 16. A final word ...; Answers to questions; Appendix 1. Direct standardisation; Appendix 2. Standard populations; Appendix 3. Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data; Appendix 4. Indirect standardisation; Appendix 5. Calculating life expectancy from a life table; Appendix 6. The Mantel-Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios; Appendix 7. Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures; Index.