Epidemiology

April 21, 2004 1:46 PM

I've been watching 24 this season and it has gotten me interested in epidemiology. Can anybody suggest a good layperson's resource, either on the web or in print about the topic? I'm looking for information on how diseases spread and how the situation gets out of control. I've done my googlework, but most of the stuff seems to be to advanced for my current understanding or not very informative. Case studies and response projections would be awesome.
posted by shotsy to science & nature (7 comments total)

PBS might be a good place to start.
posted by falconred at 2:47 PM on April 21, 2004

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the US's premier location for epidemiology. You could do worse than poke around there.

A public health unit, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has got one of those interactive exercise programs to help familiarize people with how epi would work when confronting an outbreak.

The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control has got a cool site that allows you to create injury and mortality maps.

Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?
posted by jasper411 at 3:22 PM on April 21, 2004

Thank you both. Some good info to chew over in all of your links. What I am most interested in is hypothetical rates of infection for new diseases. Person A is the first person to have a new disease. How fast does it spread if it transmission is airborn. How fast if it requires contact. I think with the provided links I will be able to start to find these answers.

Cheers to AskMe.
posted by shotsy at 3:45 PM on April 21, 2004

I've been watching 24 this season too. The first thing that came to mind watching Tuesday's episode was that they were borrowing inspiration from the SARS outbreak.
posted by bobo123 at 5:07 PM on April 21, 2004

Here are a few books for you to read which have sort of medical-detective approaches to epidemiology. All of them are non-fiction and interesting to the non-doctor

New Guinea Tapeworms & Jewish Grandmothers  by Robert Desowitz [my review, lots of discussions of infection vectors and tracking them down]
Flu by Gina Kolata [my review]
The Incurable Wound by Berton Rouche [my review, anything by him will be great]
Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC by Joseph McCormick & Susan Fisher-Hoch [forgot to review, this book discusses the transmission of African diseases such as Ebola and Lassa & vectors of same, very very spooky]

I'm just starting a book right now called The Speckled Monster which is a history of smallpox, don't know yet if it's any good.
posted by jessamyn at 6:20 PM on April 21, 2004

The Coming Plague may be of interest.
posted by dobbs at 7:03 PM on April 21, 2004

There's some very interesting reading here from the CDC website - lots of both detailed and broad info on what happend with SARS.
posted by soplerfo at 7:34 AM on April 22, 2004