Course Description:
This course is an upper-level course designed for students who would like to continue studying epidemiology. This course includes: a historical perspective on infectious disease (ID) epidemiology, ethics of ID research, basic biostatistics and study design methods as they apply to ID outbreaks and epidemics, the multi-causal and social aspects of ID, surveillance, and control of epidemics. Emphasis will be placed on investigative techniques, epidemiological methodology, and critical thinking about epidemiological studies and data.
GPH 712 Principles of Epidemiology
Forum Discussions: Each student is expected to post at least twice each week in response to forum questions on that week’s topic. Initial posts are due by 11:59pm ET on Sunday. Your response must be completed by 11:59pm ET Wednesday for credit. Because this is an online course, the online discussion portion is an important way to exchange ideas with your classmates. Students will be graded on their participation and effort of their posts. These posts will take time to complete but they are an essential part of this on-line course and a great way to get to know your colleagues. Please be familiar with the course material (readings/lectures) before posting each week. Full marks will be given to those who ask questions, bring in new data from the literature or other resources, and demonstrate a thorough understanding of the topics for the week.
Some discussions will require two posts, and some will require three. Please pay attention to the instructions of any prompt to avoid any confusion.
Interpreting Key Measures of Infectious Diseases – Week 2
Report on the measures of association for an infectious disease that has not yet been eradicated and for which there is no vaccine. Requires at least two peer-reviewed publications.
Outbreak Investigation – Week 3
Respond in stages to a simulated disease outbreak investigation. You will not be able to see the prompts for the entire assignment at once; instead, additional stages will reveal themselves as you submit your responses to preceding stages.
Week 5 and 6 Oral Presentations
Each presentation will put you in the position of communicating subject-specific information to a target audience. The audience for the first presentation is the general public, and the form of the presentation is a PSA, so you will need to communicate the information you are presenting in such a way that people from a wide variety of backgrounds will understand it. The second oral presentation is toward clinicians, in the form of an educational video for a technical audience, and so should be presented as though to an audience with a great deal of experience already in your field.
Design Data Collection Tool for Infectious Disease Investigations
You will generate an online questionnaire and database using the software RedCap (see Week 2, “Thinking ahead” for instructions on how to obtain a RedCap account). For this questionnaire, imagine you are an infectious disease epidemiologist and you have confirmed an outbreak in your region. You have verified the diagnosis, and will need to select a study design and then design a questionnaire to collect risk information.
Week 4 and Week 7 Quizzes: These quizzes cover information from Weeks 1 through 4 and Week 5 through 7, respectively. The quizzes will be taken in Blackboard and you will have a single attempt for each of them. They will not be available to take after the week in which they are due passes.
Your grade in this course will be determined by the following criteria:
Assignments | Total: 100 Points |
---|---|
Discussion Posts (2 x 4 points and 3 x 6 points) | 26 |
Written Assignments (2 x 10) | 20 |
Oral Presentations (2 x 10) | 20 |
Data Collection Tool Assignment | 14 |
Quizzes (2 x 10 points) | 20 |
Total | 100 |
Grade | Points Grade | Point Average (GPA) |
A | 94 – 100% | 4.00 |
A- | 90 – 93% | 3.75 |
B+ | 87 – 89% | 3.50 |
B | 84 – 86% | 3.00 |
B- | 80 – 83% | 2.75 |
C+ | 77 – 79% | 2.50 |
C | 74 – 76% | 2.00 |
C- | 70 – 73% | 1.75 |
D | 64 – 69% | 1.00 |
F | 00 – 63% | 0.00 |
Week 1: | Feb 27 – Mar 6 |
Week 2: | Mar 6 – Mar 13 |
Week 3: | Mar 13 – Mar 20 |
Week 4: | Mar 20 – Mar 27 |
Week 5: | Mar 27 – Apr 3 |
Week 6: | Apr 3 – Apr 10 |
Week 7: | Apr 10 – Apr 17 |
Week 8: | Apr 17 – Apr 21 (Sunday) |
Introduction Discussion
Week 1 Discussion
Response 1: Consider the characteristics of a peer’s selected infectious disease, in particular the mode of transmission and the natural history. Imagine you are in the early stages of an infectious disease outbreak investigation and the disease has similar characteristics to that described by your peer. Name at least one other infectious disease you might believe to be the cause of the outbreak. Describe at least 2 similarities between the two diseases (the one you came up with and your peer’s) that would make distinguishing between them, without diagnostic testing, especially difficult.
Response 2: Using a high-quality resource, state the incidence and prevalence of the infectious disease described in another peer’s initial post. You may report the prevalence and incidence world-wide or for a specific country. Explain the mathematical relationship between incidence and prevalence in the context of this disease.
Week 2 Discussion
Response Post: Read the news article cited in a peer’s post. Using a reputable source, identify the annual incidence of the disease in the locale on which the news article reports. If the incidence is not available for the specific locale, you can use a similar locale or larger region (e.g., if the outbreak occurred in a city, you may need to report on the incidence in that state). Interpret the annual incidence of the disease in the context of the information reported in the news article. What other information would you add to the news article to help people understand the severity (whether it is high or low) of the outbreak? Make sure you are responding to a post on a disease that you did not report on this week or in Week 1.
Week 2 Written Assignment: Interpreting Key Measures of Infectious Disease
Identify two peer-reviewed publications that report on measures of association for the selected disease. Each study should report measures of association for at least two exposures. Exposures can include sociodemographic characteristics, individual behaviors, environmental factors, genetics, etc. For each study:
Describe the study, including the: study design, target population, persons (i.e., sociodemographic characteristics), place, and time of the study. Further details found in Week 2 Module.
Week 3 Written Assignment: Outbreak Investigation
Quiz 1
Week 5 Discussion (6 points)
Download the Twine file and open it on your computer; it should open in your Internet browser.
As you move through the scenario in Twine, be sure to take notes to answer the prompt below.
For your initial post:
Note that you will be able to go through the exercise in Twine as many times as you want, choosing different paths each time. However, your initial post should focus on a single path—your first one. There is not a single “correct” path. You are not being graded on the path you chose, but rather on your ability to critically analyze your choices, what went into those choices, and their apparent consequences.
Response 1: Examine the path chosen by one of your peers. Identify at least one instance in which your peer may have been challenged by a hypothetical colleague for the choice they made—in other words, a hypothetical colleague collaborating with your peer in the scenario, who believes your peer should have chosen a different step in that instance. State specifically what the colleague might say is the better choice, and how they might support alternative path. Cite peer-reviewed publications to justify the alternative path.
Response 2: Review the initial post from a different peer as well as the response(s) to that peer’s post. How might your peer respond to the colleague’s challenge? In other words, how might your peer justify their original path, given the arguments presented against that path? Then, thinking more broadly, state at least two challenges hospitals face in reducing HAIs successfully. Why do you think these challenges are particularly difficult to overcome?
Oral Presentation 1: Public Service Announcement to Prevent Spread of an Infectious Disease
Select a disease that is endemic to a region of your choice from the following list: Chlamydia, Dengue fever, Chikungunya, Cytomegalovirus, Leishmaniasis, or Malaria. You should select a disease that you have not reported on for any previous assignments.
The local health department is actively trying to reduce the incidence of the selected disease. You must apply the principles of disease transmission to develop a prevention and control plan. The PSA’s function is to describe both individual prevention and control measures, as well as any community-level measures that will be put into place by the public health department.
Week 6 Discussion:
Once you select your disease, select two geographies to compare (e.g., two states, one state and the nation, a region and the nation, etc). For the initial post, you will obtain data for 10 time points, either weeks or years. You will then graph these data in a format you believe to be useful based on this week’s lecture.
For the most recent time point, compare the incidence of the disease between the two geographies. Use an online calculator (for example, MedCalc) to test for significant differences between the incidence in the two geographies. Finally, offer an interpretation of your results.
Be sure to cite your sources of data correctly, and include links to the sources of data for the sake of your classmates.
Response 1: Thinking specifically about the disease selected by a peer: do you believe that the disease incidence calculated using these data is lower, higher or about equal to the true incidence in the two populations? Justify your answer, citing high-quality peer-reviewed journal publications to support your justification.
Response 2: Review another peer’s initial post. Assume the true incidence is lower or higher than that calculated using the provided data. Consider two scenarios: a) the error in the incidence is systematic (always low or always high) among geographies and over time and b) the error is random and varies among geographies and over time. Compare and contrast these two scenarios. State whether or you think it matters if the calculation if the calculation is wrong and if you opinion differs for scenario a and scenario b.
Oral Presentation 2: Creating an Educational Video for a Technical Audience
You have been asked to develop an educational video for clinicians that describes the accuracy of your diagnostic test, as well as its predictive values. The results from your latest study, a population-based sample of 10,000 people, are below. You will use these data to report the sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values for the test. Your presentation should also interpret these values and provide guidance for clinicians in regards to how to explain the results to their patients. (These values, and further directions, are presented in the Week 6 Module).
The presentation should be no more than 5 minutes long. Make sure the video is geared towards clinicians, a technical audience (i.e., physicians and nurses). You may use the software Screencast-o-matic, or any other software you are comfortable with, to create the video. You can use only slides, only video of yourself or a mix of both, but ensure the video is professional (e.g., dress appropriately, format your slides for an audience, etc). Upload your completed video to YouTube and submit the URL (make sure your YouTube account is not set to private).
Assignments
Written Assignment: Designing Data Collection Tools for Infectious Disease Investigations
For this assignment, you may choose from the following list of diseases for the outbreak: diphtheria, hepatitis B, measles, meningitis, mumps, pertussis, rubella, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.
Your online survey should include 15 to 20 questions that will aid in establishing the what, when, where and who of the outbreak. You should assume you have some information and should be using primarily close-coded questions. You may identify and use questions from previously created surveys published online by reputable sources (e.g., CDC, WHO), but at least 30% of your questions (4 to 6) should be original (created by you). At least one question should require the use of branching logic. At least one question should allow participants to “Select all that apply,” and at least one question should require the participants to select only one answer. Your instructor will provide their RedCap user name. You should add your instructor as a “user” of your survey so they can access the online designer and see your work.
You will submit 3 items for this assignment: 1) the URL to your RedCap survey, 2) a pdf copy of the survey database, and 3) a document that lists your references as well as which questions (by number) are from what source, and which questions are original and developed by you.
Quiz 2
Week 8 Discussion
Response: Review the publication identified by a peer. Considering the systems thinking methodology used, name another infectious disease you might be able to investigate that would leverage the work done in your peers’ study. In other words, for which infectious disease could the model generated in the study be re-used or adapted? Next, create a stock and flow diagram of the system in which this disease is transmitted and/or intervened upon. Your diagram should be specific to the disease you select and should include at least 3 stocks, at least 3 flows and at least two converters and connectors.
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The American Medical Association Manual (AMA) of Style, 11th edition is the required writing format for this course. Additional support for academic writing and AMA format is provided throughout the coursework as well as at the UNE Portal for Online Students.
Online resources: AMA Style Guide
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Make sure to cite your sources appropriately as well as use your own words in synthesizing information from published literature. Webinars and workshops, included early in your coursework, will help guide best practices in APA citation and academic writing.
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Students are responsible for submitting work by the date indicated in Brightspace.
Quizzes and Tests: Quizzes and tests must be completed by the due date. They will not be accepted after the due date.
Assignments: Unless otherwise specified, assignments will be accepted up to 3 days late; however, there is a 10% grade reduction (from the total points) for the late submission. After three days the assignment will not be accepted.
Discussion posts: If the initial post is submitted late, but still within the discussion board week, there will be a 10% grade reduction from the total discussion grade (e.g., a 3 point discussion will be reduced by 0.3 points). Any posts submitted after the end of the Discussion Board week will not be graded.
Please make every effort ahead of time to contact your instructor and your student support specialist if you are not able to meet an assignment deadline. Arrangements for extenuating circumstances may be considered by faculty.
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