00:00
Hello and welcome to epidemiology, one of the
most exciting and fastest-growing of the medical
sciences, of course I'm biased, I'm an epidemiologist,
but maybe after you hear a little bit about
it you'll feel the same way as me. The thing
about epidemiology that makes it so fascinating
is first of all, in my opinion, it's the only
medical science that probably doesn't involve
a lot of medicine and also some epidemiologist
are sort of like medical detectives. They
are on the ground collecting data, talking
to people, solving mysteries about what causes
diseases in a population. It can be quite
sexy, quite exciting, kind of like a police
investigator, except around medicine. So today
we're going to learn about the differences
between descriptive and analytical studies
in epidemiology, we're going to learn a little
bit about the historical origins of epidemiology,
where it came from and maybe even where it's
going. And we're also going to learn a little
bit about the triumphs of epidemiology, because
I think it's important to brag a little bit
about the things that we've done for society
over the last couple of hundred years.
01:00
So when we talk about epidemiology, it's traditional
to define at first, it's difficult to define
however. This is one particularly popular
definition, it's offered by the Centers for
Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia and they
say that epidemiology is the study of the
distribution and determinants of disease or
health status in a population, okay. Wikipedia
offers a little more complicated definition,
calling it the branch of medicine that deals
with incidences, distribution and so forth,
I would add in prevalence and mortality and
so forth, it gets complicated pretty fast
and pretty dry. Most text book definitions
of epidemiology land somewhere between the
two poles, the CDC and Wikipedia, I will offer
you another definition. In my opinion, it's
the science of science, or if you want to
be a little dryer, it's the science of looking
at the health of populations, rather than
of individuals. Hopefully this will all be
clear to you when we're done with the lecture.