BIOL 442 - Epidemiology

Units: 3
Study of the patterns of health and disease conditions in populations. Identification of risk factors for disease transmission and targets for preventive healthcare. Introduction to the epidemiological study areas such as outbreak investigation, disease surveillance, biomonitoring, and clinical trials evaluation.

Prerequisites: BIOL 140B.
Possible Instructional Methods: On-ground.
Grading: A-F grading only.
Student Learning Outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:

Define epidemiology and describe its components, such as determinants, distribution, morbidity, and mortality;
Differentiate between causal inference, primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention and person, place and time;
Define and distinguish ratios, proportions, rates as well as populations at risk;
Explain the meaning of application of incidence rates and prevalence;
Describe the principles of an outbreak investigation;
Differentiate study designs, such as ecological, cross section, case-control, cohort studies, and experimental study designs as well as the measure of effect of many studies;
Characterize the epidemiology of major infectious diseases such as HIV, influenza and STDs;
Identify the role of bias and confounding errors in epidemiological studies.