Objectives
After studying this lesson and answering the questions in the exercises, you will be able to:
List the reasons that health agencies investigate reported outbreaks
List the steps in the investigation of an outbreak
Define cluster, outbreak, and epidemic
Given the initial information of a possible disease outbreak, describe how to determine whether an epidemic exists
State the purpose of a line listing
Given information about a community outbreak of disease, list the initial steps of an investigation
Given the appropriate information from the initial steps of an outbreak investigation, develop biologically plausible hypotheses
Draw and interpret an epidemic curve
Given data in a two-by-two table, calculate the appropriate measure of association