Course description

This subject is an applied mathematical field of science, which deals with the examination of health-related events at population level. The discipline gives a thorough overview of the quantitative methods and the evaluation of their results.

Chief lecturer: associate professor Norbert Solymosi, DVM

Lectures theme

1. Presentation of the actual epidemiological situation
– epidemiology of African Swine Fever in Hungary

2. Introduction to Epidemiology
– aims of the course, currently published scientific literature resources
– definition of Epidemiology, brief introduction to its main fields
– history of Epidemiology
– discussion on causality, main types of causal models
– introduction tot he model-based approach
– quantitative models- fields of application in human and veterinary medicine

3. Quantitative description of the occurrence of  infectious diseases in populations I.
– incidence and prevalence

4. Quantitative description of the occurrence of  infectious diseases in populations II.
mortality, survival and adjusted measures

5. Interpretation of the results of tests used in the diagnostics of infectious diseases I.
– measures of accuracy – sensitivity and specificity
– presentation of dichotomous and continuous scale diagnostic methods, ROC

6. Interpretation of the results of tests used in the diagnostics of infectious diseases II.
– predictive values
– combination of tests
– agreement of tests

7. Interpretation of the results of tests used in the diagnostics of infectious diseases III.
– prevalence adjusting with the bias of diagnostic tests
– evaluation of test results at herd/flock level
– estimation of sample number for the diagnostics at herd/flock level

8. Measures of association I.
– introduction to study designs
– discussion of association between outcome and exposure
– presentation of the case of binomial outcome and exposure

9. Measures of association II.
– presentation of the mostly used association measures (AR, AF, PAR, PAF, NNT, RR, OR)

10. Measures of association III.
– uncertainty of associations
– the case of more than two outcome/exposure states
– the case of continuous – continuous outcome/exposure (LM)
– the case of binomial- continuous associations (logit)
– association measures of survival studies (HR)

11. Evidence-based veterinary medicine
– ask > acquire > appraise > apply > assess
– evidence synthesis

12. Spatial epidemiology I.
– disease mapping
– geographical pattern analysis

13. Spatial epidemiology II.
– ecological analysis

14. Theoretical Epidemiology
– discussion on the stochastic and deterministic models
– the spread of disease model (SIR)
– discussion on the ratio of population for immunisation