Question

What role does statistics play in epidemiology and public health?

Answer 1

Epidemiology is the study of those factors affecting the health of a given population. Public Health is the managment of those factors. Together, they act as a concept known as preventive medicine.

Modern epidemiological studies result in large quantities of data that have to be subject to statistical analysis. Biostatistics is one tool in the epidemiology tool-box; it is the collective name for a number of statistical methods and models that have been developed for the design, analysis and interpretation of data from large-scale studies.

Preventing infectious disease – vaccines and randomized controlled trials.

Occupational Epidemiology

Occupational epidemiology has been defined as the study of the effects of workplace exposures on the frequency and distribution of diseases and injuries in the population. Thus it is an exposure-oriented discipline with links to both epidemiology and occupational health. As such, it uses methods similar to those employed by epidemiology in general.

The main objective of occupational epidemiology is prevention through identifying the consequences of workplace exposures on health. This underscores the preventive focus of occupational epidemiology. Indeed, all research in the field of occupational health and safety should serve preventive purposes. Hence, epidemiological knowledge can and should be readily implementable. While the public health interest always should be the primary concern of epidemiological research, vested interests can exercise influence, and care must be taken to minimize such influence in the formulation, conduct and/or interpretation of studies

A second objective of occupational epidemiology is to use results from specific settings to reduce or to eliminate hazards in the population at large. Thus, apart from providing information on the health effects of exposures in the workplace, the results from occupational epidemiology studies also play a role in the estimation of risk associated with the same exposures but at the lower levels generally experienced by the general population. Environmental contamination from industrial processes and products usually would result in lower levels of exposure than those experienced in the workplace.

The levels of application of occupational epidemiology are:

·     surveillance to describe the occurrence of illness in different categories of workers and so provide early warning signals of unrecognized occupational hazards

·     generation and testing of an hypothesis that a given exposure may be harmful, and the quantification of an effect

·     evaluation of an intervention (for example, a preventive action such as reduction in exposure levels) by measuring changes in the health status of a population over time.