Category:Assessing the burden of disease and risk assessment

Effective disease prevention and control depends on several factors that must be present and work together in the community. It all starts with the ability to detect threats to the population's health. A threat can be seen as an undesirable situation that has not yet occurred but that may happen unless protective measures are taken. The ability to detect a disease threat implies that we already have basic knowledge about the 'normal occurrence (or burden)' of this disease in the population.

Assessing the burden of disease requires a public health workforce competent to collect, analyze and interpret health data from "your" population and the healthcare system infrastructure that allows access to relevant data. Methods used in Field Epidemiology play a central part in assessing disease burden.

Detect health threats requires (in addition to the above) continuous monitoring of the burden of disease information of 'your own' and surrounding populations, trends in risk behavior, characteristics of pathogens (e.g., development of antimicrobial resistance) plus competent staff responsible for the continuous collection, analysis, and interpretation of information. Detecting health threats is sometimes referred to as epidemic intelligence.

Once health threats have been detected and validated, information must be shared with "those who need to know" in the health system. This usually requires translating specific epidemiology jargon into a format used by policy and decision-makers to decide on interventions (preventive and control measures).

This part of this FEMWiki addresses methods that can be used to assess the population's health status and detect and assess health threats. Methods for Surveillance, Risk Assessment, and Outbreak Investigations will be described in this section.

Interventions (public health measures, policy-making, and decision-taking) are discussed in another part of the FEMWIKI. Communication is yet another topic.

Editors and contributors:

Arnold Bosman, Patty Kostkova