Epidemiology affects our lives on a daily basis: from the way we make decisions related to our health and well-being on a personal level to the way health policy decisions are made by the government, public health agencies, and medical organizations. Over the years, epidemiology has helped identify disease outbreaks, provided surveillance on the state of public health, and established the association of many risk factors with adverse health outcomes.    

We'll start with an introduction and examples of epidemiology accomplishments over the years. Next, it presents sources of public health surveillance data and describes how they can be used to make health policy decisions, as well as identify areas where further research, and possibly interventions, are needed. Finally, it ends with the standard measures of disease occurrence and frequency, and ways to use these measurements to compare populations.