background - epidemiology

Very simply speaking, epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health in a population. It is not the study of skin diseases! Where a physician is concerned with the health particulars of individuals, the epidemiologist is concerned with the overall health particulars of the population. So this covers, for example, outbreak detection, intervention and prevention, services and program delivery and efficacy, environmental and social health determinants, etc. Traditionally, epidemiology - or "epi" as some like to call it - focused more on infectious diseases, emphasising a "host - vector - environment" triad. But today, with the increasing realisation of the importance and impact of chronic diseases as well, it has become so much more. Though the former triad has been adapted to apply to chronic diseases as well, we now define descriptive epidemiology as being built on the triad of "person - place - time".

Publications

A Method for Managing Re-Identification Risk from Small Geographic Areas in Canada
(BMC Med Inform Decis Mak, 2010)

Musings on Privacy Issues in Health Research Involving Disaggregate Geographic Data About Individuals (Int J Health Geogr, 2009)

Evaluating Predictors of Geographic Area Population Size Cut-offs (JAMIA, 2009)

The Perceived Impact of Location Privacy
(BMC Public Health, 2008)