Exercises in Public Health Epidemiology

Exercise 1: Describing a Health Outcome in Your Jurisdiction

You may work with your peers and/or consult with the instructors to complete this exercise; however, the submitted assignment must be your own work, with responses stated in your own words unless you give attribution to the source. For the opportunity to earn partial credit, you should show your work for the problems in the exercise. It is not be sufficient to copy verbatim from lecture slides to answer questions. When asked for explanations, your explanation should demonstrate your understanding of a concept.

1.You are responsible for describing the frequency (incidence or prevalence, whichever is more appropriate given the characteristics of the outcome) of a health outcome (of your choice) within a jurisdiction (e.g., the city, county, state, or country) where you currently reside (if your location makes completing this question difficult, email the instructional team to discuss an alternative).  Describe the outcome with regard to person, place, and time characteristics within that jurisdiction.

Calculate the measure of frequency that is most appropriate for this outcome for the selected jurisdiction (during a time period which you specify) (1 point). Provide a justification for why you selected the measure of frequency that you did (1 point). Calculate the appropriate ratio measure of effect using the measure of frequency you calculated above and the same measure of frequency for another jurisdiction (same level, e.g. census tract versus census tract, county versus county, state versus state) (1 point). Provide an interpretation of this ratio measure of effect.

Post your response to question one to your small group discussion. Be sure to include the data source. Select a peer’s response to this question and evaluate it. The evaluation should include whether the appropriate measures of frequency and association were calculated, ensuring that the calculation (this will require you to access the data source) is correct, and whether the interpretation of the measure of association is appropriate. Copy and paste your evaluation into this assignment (if you fail to include the discussion posts in the assignment that the TAs review, you will not earn these points). Be mindful of the guidelines for communication on discussion boards when participating in the discussion.

2.State a topic in public health that is of interest to you. Identify and briefly describe a data source from which you could obtain data in order to describe the epidemiology of the specified topic.


3.Based on data from the 2017 YRBSS of high school students, what drug (among alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs) did the respondents most commonly endorse ever using (1 point)? What proportion of respondents reported ever using this drug, and what was the prevalence of current use of this drug?


4.How would undercounting the US census affect assessing the prevalence of a particular disease, assuming that the number of people with the disease is accurate? Justify your response.

5.A study was conducted examining the relationship between paternal age and incidence of autism among children. The study reported a risk ratio of 3.52 (95% CI:  2.53, 4.65) for every 10-year increase in paternal age. The outcome of interest was autism. Provide an interpretation of this risk ratio, i.e. state in words what this measure of effect means. Is this finding statistically significant at the α = 0.05 level. Justify your response.

6.Using CDC WONDER, determine which age group experienced the highest crude mortality rate due to unintentional poisoning (hint:  poisoning is an injury) in 2017 (1 point). Which state had the highest age-adjusted mortality rate for unintentional poisoning that same year?

7.You are a public health practitioner tasked with describing the epidemiology of type II diabetes. Describe a circumstance or target audience for which you would be more likely to present an estimate of the prevalence of diabetes in your jurisdiction rather than the incidence of diabetes.

8.Explain a circumstance during which an increase in the incidence of a disease could be an “artifact of surveillance” rather than a true increase in the incidence of the disease.

9.Discuss the motivation for calculating age-adjusted rates when making international comparisons of morbidity and mortality.