Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1Epidemiology is…
- 2How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
- 3Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology
- 4Healthy research: study designs for public health
- 5Why? Linking exposure and disease
- 6Heads or tails: the role of chance
- 7All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error
- 8Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding
- 9Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers
- 10Who sank the boat? Association and causation
- 11Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses
- 12Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters
- 13Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence
- 14Prevention: better than cure?
- 15Early detection: what benefits at what cost?
- 16A final word…
- Answers to questions
- Appendix 1Direct standardisation
- Appendix 2Standard populations
- Appendix 3Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data
- Appendix 4Indirect standardisation
- Appendix 5Calculating life expectancy from a life table
- Appendix 6The Mantel-Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios
- Appendix 7Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures
- Glossary
- Index
- References
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
2 - How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1Epidemiology is…
- 2How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
- 3Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology
- 4Healthy research: study designs for public health
- 5Why? Linking exposure and disease
- 6Heads or tails: the role of chance
- 7All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error
- 8Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding
- 9Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers
- 10Who sank the boat? Association and causation
- 11Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses
- 12Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters
- 13Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence
- 14Prevention: better than cure?
- 15Early detection: what benefits at what cost?
- 16A final word…
- Answers to questions
- Appendix 1Direct standardisation
- Appendix 2Standard populations
- Appendix 3Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data
- Appendix 4Indirect standardisation
- Appendix 5Calculating life expectancy from a life table
- Appendix 6The Mantel-Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios
- Appendix 7Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures
- Glossary
- Index
- References
Summary
Box 2.1 Who drinks the most beer?
According to the Brewers Association of Japan, the Chinese now drink the most beer in the world (28,640 million litres in 2004) followed by the Americans (23,974 million litres). In contrast the Czech Republic ranked a lowly 15th in terms of total consumption (1,878 million litres) and Ireland didn't even make the top 25. This information may be useful for planning production, but do the Chinese and Americans really drink more beer than the rest of us? An alternative and possibly more informative way to look at these data is in terms of consumption per capita. When we do this, the USA falls to 13th position in the ‘beer drinking league table’ (82 litres per capita in 2004) and China falls way off the screen (a mere 22 litres per capita). The Czechs are now the champions (157 litres per capita), followed by the Irish (131 litres per capita) with Germany and Australia, two nations who tend to pride themselves on their beer drinking, ranked in 3rd (116 litres) and 4th (110 litres) place, respectively.
(Source: www.brewers.or.jp, accessed 10 October 2009.)Many different measures are used by researchers and policy makers to describe the health of populations. You have already met some of these, for example the attack rate which was used to investigate the source of the outbreak investigation in the previous chapter.
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- Type
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- Essential EpidemiologyAn Introduction for Students and Health Professionals, pp. 29 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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