Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Epidemiology is…
- 2 How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
- 3 Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology
- 4 Healthy research: study designs for public health
- 5 Why? Linking exposure and disease
- 6 Heads or tails: the role of chance
- 7 All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error
- 8 Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding
- 9 Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers
- 10 Who sank the boat? Association and causation
- 11 Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses
- 12 Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters
- 13 Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence
- 14 Prevention: better than cure?
- 15 Early detection: what benefits at what cost?
- 16 A final word…
- Answers to questions
- Appendix 1 Direct standardisation
- Appendix 2 Standard populations
- Appendix 3 Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data
- Appendix 4 Indirect standardisation
- Appendix 5 Calculating life expectancy from a life table
- Appendix 6 The Mantel-Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios
- Appendix 7 Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures
- Glossary
- Index
- References
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
2 - How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Epidemiology is…
- 2 How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
- 3 Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology
- 4 Healthy research: study designs for public health
- 5 Why? Linking exposure and disease
- 6 Heads or tails: the role of chance
- 7 All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error
- 8 Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding
- 9 Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers
- 10 Who sank the boat? Association and causation
- 11 Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses
- 12 Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters
- 13 Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence
- 14 Prevention: better than cure?
- 15 Early detection: what benefits at what cost?
- 16 A final word…
- Answers to questions
- Appendix 1 Direct standardisation
- Appendix 2 Standard populations
- Appendix 3 Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data
- Appendix 4 Indirect standardisation
- Appendix 5 Calculating life expectancy from a life table
- Appendix 6 The Mantel-Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios
- Appendix 7 Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures
- Glossary
- Index
- References
Summary
Box 2.1 Who drinks the most beer?
According to the Brewers Association of Japan, the Chinese now drink the most beer in the world (28,640 million litres in 2004) followed by the Americans (23,974 million litres). In contrast the Czech Republic ranked a lowly 15th in terms of total consumption (1,878 million litres) and Ireland didn't even make the top 25. This information may be useful for planning production, but do the Chinese and Americans really drink more beer than the rest of us? An alternative and possibly more informative way to look at these data is in terms of consumption per capita. When we do this, the USA falls to 13th position in the ‘beer drinking league table’ (82 litres per capita in 2004) and China falls way off the screen (a mere 22 litres per capita). The Czechs are now the champions (157 litres per capita), followed by the Irish (131 litres per capita) with Germany and Australia, two nations who tend to pride themselves on their beer drinking, ranked in 3rd (116 litres) and 4th (110 litres) place, respectively.
(Source: www.brewers.or.jp, accessed 10 October 2009.)Many different measures are used by researchers and policy makers to describe the health of populations. You have already met some of these, for example the attack rate which was used to investigate the source of the outbreak investigation in the previous chapter.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Essential EpidemiologyAn Introduction for Students and Health Professionals, pp. 29 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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