Monitoring the Health of Populations Statistical Principles and Methods for Public Health Surveillance

by Brookmeyer, Ron; Stroup, Donna F.

• ISBN13: 9780195146493
• ISBN10: 0195146492
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Public health faces critical challenges ranging from outbreaks of new and old pathogens to the threat of bioterrorism and the impact of lifestyle and environmental changes on health. Modern tools of health surveillance and sound statistical practices are essential for meeting these challengesand providing accurate warnings about real public health threats without wasting resources on false alarms. Advances in statistical techniques, computing power and the Internet have led to many new approaches to monitoring population health, analyzing the data, and rapidly sharing it. This text explores the critical issues in the statistical analysis and interpretation of public health surveillance data. It covers statistical methods for detecting disease outbreaks and clusters, the use of survey methods, interpreting time trends and geographic patterns, exploratory statisticalanalysis of surveillance data, and web-based health reporting systems for the rapid detection of public health problems, among other topics. The methodological approaches are illustrated in discussions of several current public health issues, including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, anthrax, health effectsof particulate air pollution, and trends in prostate cancer. The methods are broadly applicable to surveillance systems and registries for numerous health conditions, e.g. infectious diseases, chronic diseases, adverse drug reactions. The book provides numerous illustrations, worked examples, and practical information for actually implementing the methods. It will serve as a reference for public health practitioners and as a textbook for courses on disease surveillance taken by students of statistics biostatistics, epidemiologyor public health.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. xv
Public Health Surveillance in Action: A Framework	p. 1
The Use of Surveys in Public Health Surveillance: Monitoring High-Risk Populations	p. 37
Exploring Temporal and Spatial Patterns in Public Health Surveillance Data	p. 71
Temporal Factors in Public Health Surveillance: Sorting Out Age, Period, and Cohort Effects	p. 99
Temporal Factors in Epidemics: The Role of the Incubation Period	p. 127
Using Public Health Data to Evaluate Screening Programs: Application to Prostate Cancer	p. 147
Detecting Disease Clustering in Time or Space	p. 167
Outbreak Detection: Application to Infectious Disease Surveillance	p. 203
On-line Monitoring of Public Health Surveillance Data	p. 233
Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling of Public Health Surveillance Data: A Case Study of Air Pollution and Mortality	p. 267
Some Considerations in Spatial-Temporal Analysis of Public Health Surveillance Data	p. 289
Ecologic Inference Problems in the Analysis of Surveillance Data	p. 315
Completeness of Reporting: Capture-Recapture Methods in Public Health Surveillance	p. 341
Index	p. 361
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