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