Epidemiology is a tool, in many ways, to understand the distribution of disease in populations, and the factors that lead to higher or lower rates of disease and ways of effectively preventing disease.
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00:00Epidemiology is the study of the emergence, distribution, and control of disease, disability, and death among groups of people.
00:09It's a field that combines elements of biology, clinical medicine, sociology, mathematics, and ecology to identify and understand health patterns and improve human health across the globe.
00:21Epidemiologists are doctors and scientists who work to understand the source of disease and other negative health effects.
00:27They estimate how many people are exposed and how the disease spreads.
00:32Epidemiologists are generally associated with infectious diseases and outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic,
00:38but they also study non-infectious health problems like the prevalence of lung cancer from smoking or a community's increase in homicide rates.
00:47The epidemiologic triangle is a tool epidemiologists use for explaining the connection between the cause of a disease and the conditions that allow it to spread.
00:57The triangle's three corners represent the who, what, and where of a disease.
01:03Who is the host or person or people who has the disease?
01:07What is the agent or cause of the disease?
01:11And where or in what environment does the disease occur?
01:14The goal of an epidemiologist is to figure out how to sever at least one link between the corners of that triangle.
01:22Breaking the connection between the host, agent, and environment stops the disease in its tracks.
01:28In early March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiologists from Imperial College London released a model showing the potential impacts of the disease if certain prevention methods were implemented or not.
01:42The scientists recommended large-scale social distancing to slow the spread of the virus and prevent millions of people from dying,
01:51thus severing the connection between the where and the who.
01:54The team's recommendations became public policy in many parts of the world and will result in fewer cases of the disease than expected had the triangle remained intact.