So I was trying to find something on Implied fractions on the internet but nothing valuable. Does anybody know and if yes can someone please explain?

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So, I’m not really good with statistics but I need some help in determining the sample size for my study. I want to do a pre-intervention/post-intervention study in the same group of people. In the study I would measure my outcome in the population before my intervention, then, in the same population, I would implement my intervention and measure the outcome then.

So I opened WinPepi to help calculate my sample size. I went to Compare2, opened Sample size, clicked on Change (using before-after ratings) and then input the parameters of my study and hit calculate.

The calculator than said that I need 1000 participants, 500 in each group. But according to the type of study I am trying to do, I would only need one group? Should I use a single group of 1000 or 500? Am I doing this all wrong?

Any help would be appreciated.

Hi all. I work as a health quality analyst at an insurer. I'm being asked to evaluate if an intervention to reach out to members by phone led to improved health quality metrics. We did not randomize the phones because without informed consent it would be unethical to provide outreach to one half and withhold from the other. This leads to the question of how to best evaluate. So far the best I've come up with is to compare members we did reach by phone to those we did not. This is not a perfect cohort design, but I'm otherwise at a loss for how to do this with academic rigor. The other issue is whether we include members we specifically had a wrong phone number for or include them with the members we could only leave a voicemail for. My colleague is of the opinion that we should not include them because we never actually had a chance to reach those members, but I simply don't understand why that population should be excluded when we are including members that we could only leave a voicemail for. If the exposure is direct interaction with the member, shouldn't we include any member that did not get direct interaction as a comparison rather than removing them from the analysis altogether? If feels arbitrary to me. Am I looking at all this completely wrong? Should I turn in my MPH as a fraud and a fool?

Do you all accept requests to provide peer review? Peer review is of course critical, but I don’t love how so much science is gated and how journals and not scientists benefit financially from the process. Like, I would work for free on this if I knew everyone else was, otherwise I feel like my labor is being exploited and they count on me doing it anyway because they know that as a scientist I value the process.

For me, not trained as an epidemiologist but working with many, I struggle to remember what certain study design terms actually mean. I have a background in engineering so I am a working scientist it's just that the names of epi study designs seem to make no sense to me.

Any help?

Specifically I work with air pollution epidemiology if that helps.

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I’m beginning my MPH with a concentration in Epi this August. I’m beyond excited and eager to immerse myself in some of the more important content.

I’d love to hear both fiction and nonfiction, documentaries, thrillers, podcasts. Really anything with some interesting epidemiological significance. I started the audiobook The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson and I’ve enjoyed it so far!

I’m particularly interested in HIV/AIDs, LGBTQ+ health, social epi, and disparities.

I've recently come across consensus AI and semantic scholar, which have been incredibly useful in streamlining literature reviews on health topics.

As a result, I'm actively seeking out additional tools to help with literature synthesis, analysis, and writing to further enhance my efficiency.

Any fellow epidemiologists out there with recommendations for free or low-cost software that has been beneficial in your work?

Note: I'm already familiar with ChatGPT and copilot, but if there's others that are useful for epi work please share. Thanks in advance! 🙂

Hello,

I am calculating annual incidence rates over time by ZCTA for a time enabled map in ArcGIS pro. Historically I have just used the ending year of the 5 year estimate to calculate each year. I’ve come across the overlapping rule where you shouldn’t compare overlapping estimates to each other. Does that still apply when you’re calculating annual incidence? Say I’m calculating incidence for each year from 2018-2022, would I use the 2018-2022 estimate as the denominator for each annual rate or should I use 2014-2018, 2015-2019, 2016-2020, 2017-2021, and 2018-2022 as the denominators?

I don’t know if I’m over thinking this or not

I’m curious how to calculate the spread rate of a virus and how that would be calculated?

Hi everyone!

I’m a state Epi looking to get more involved in global communicable disease groups and networks. I know the CDC has a One Health Committee. What about US DHS? PAHO? Other ideas?

Thank you!

Has anyone ever been to the Florida BH Conference? I’m trying to figure out if it is suited to epidemiologists or if it’s more focused on practitioners.

My supervisor wants me to put together a list of a few conferences that are related to behavioral health, gun violence, or just general public health so I can choose one to go to this year so I’m just trying to get some options.

And if anyone has any other recommendations, I will definitely take them! I have Safe States, National Research Conference for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, and APHA on my list. Unfortunately, my coworker is going to CSTE and apparently she doesn’t want us both to go.

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I know of a family who owns a herd of goats, all of which are infected with something causing conjunctivitis. Their children now also have pink eye. Our county has had one confirmed small outbreak of Avian Flu in poultry. I’ve read that goats, cattle, and birds can be infected with H5N1. I’ve also read that in humans, Avian Flu can present as conjunctivitis only- and that the respiratory illness will not necessarily develop. Is there any chance at all the infected goats/children could have Avian Flu that’s primarily presenting as Pink Eye? In an attempt at more plausible explanations I have tried to find info about goat-to-human eye infections but I’m not coming up with much.

Can we start a thread of companies to avoid working for? Feel free to explain your reasonings or negative experience.

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I have met a few people that studied sociology, demography, etc. that went on to do their post-doc in epidemiology departments. Does anyone have experience doing a post-doc outside of epidemiology, specifically in social sciences?

How quickly would new diseases evolve to fit that evolutionary niche, and how similar would they be to current diseases?
If new diseases never developed somehow, how much longer would people live? How would the immune system likely react to no longer being under constant threat? Would people develop more allegeries?

Also fun fact, on this reddit in 2018 there was a post explicitly talking about the high probablity of a pandemic within a few years. Someone even mentioned SARS and coronaviruses. https://www.reddit.com/r/epidemiology/s/b4Bguc3e8d

Welcome to the r/epidemiology Advice & Career Question Megathread. All career and advice-type posts must posted within this megathread.

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First time dealing with survey data, any help is appreciated. Can I delete the missing observations from data analysis in survey weights application? Over all 15% missing data that includes outcome, exposure, covariates. I researched on imputation methods and spoke with people who worked with NHANES data. Everyone told me that they deleted all the missing information and then performed analysis rather than imputing. I checked regression model with deleting and without deleting the missing information and the odds increased a bit after deleting, however, conclusions are same. Confidence intervals are also wide in both cases (before and after deleting missing data). Any suggestions on the process of survey data analysis, when there is no strata, cluster but only weights application? How to determine if missingness is at random or not in SAS?

CDPH Commissioner Ige is again joined by Medical Directors Dr. Funk and Dr. Sloboda for an update on the current measles cases in Chicago, symptoms of the disease, how everyone can protect themselves, & more.

Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0xIZKBwWwpZOVgOde2NxpN?si=17a163c8d34343f5

Hello everyone!

Im studying epidemiology and are currently at an loss as how to proceed here?

Any epidemiologist who can lend a hand and explain this to an aspiring colleague?

Thank you!

https://preview.redd.it/3txjj8o40ppc1.png?width=604&format=png&auto=webp&s=3432f9f758bf6ab38a6a9ddd6bdc21ae7da34cae

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I'm trying to devise the criteria for my national immunisation technical advisory group (NITAG) to determine when an economic evaluation of a new vaccine is needed in the decision-making process. I think this can be generalised to the introduction of any healthcare intervention, but right now I'm thinking about vaccines.

Our NITAG doesn't have any such guidelines or criteria right now. We'll always consider vaccine safety, vaccine efficacy, immune response induced and things like that from the pivotal clinical trials. Occasionally we need to consider the potential acceptance of a new vaccine if there might be some push-back or controversy, sometimes we'll look at the justifications for recommendations for the same vaccine when used abroad, but there's no formal process to follow for aspects like that. I'd like to get one developed for economic evaluations.

Some NITAGs, like the JCVI in the UK, require economic evaluations by default. For us, occasionally we'll consider cost-effectiveness but we also don't have the right to not recommend a new vaccine if it appears to be not cost-effective. We also don't use a threshold for ICERs to determine cost-effectiveness, so a vaccine with an ICER of >200,000 € per QALY saved (for example) could still be recommended to a large target population. In other countries that would be rejected flat-out.

When trying to find literature on this topic all I can find is guidelines for conducting economic evaluations (Drummond et al., etc), but nothing yet for deciding if one is necessary.

Does anyone have any experience in this domain please?

Hello,

I am chasing any data on the international spread of LSDV particularly for south east asia. Does anyone have any leads on where I might find this?

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The study is using data from an external cohort being followed prospectively. So is the study in question a retrospective or prospective cohort study? The authors from this study aren’t the ones who designed this cohort. They are just using the data from it to conduct their study to look at a different outcome.