It may last for a few days or weeks, or even for several years. Some outbreaks are expected each year, such as influenza. Sometimes a single case of an infectious disease may be considered an outbreak. This may be true if the disease is rare e. These similarities lead many people to use the two words interchangeably or incorrectly altogether. The key difference, however, is about scale.
And for more info on need-to-know coronavirus words, see our explainers on respirator vs. Read about all the reasons why pandemic is our Word of the Year. More on the prefix epi — later. While pandemic can be used for a disease that has spread across an entire country or other large landmass, the word is generally reserved for diseases that have spread across continents or the entire world.
For instance: After documenting cases in all continents except Antarctica, scientists declared the disease a pandemic. However, pandemic appears to be most commonly used in the context of epidemiology , which is concerned with infectious diseases.
Pandemic also entered English, through Latin, in the s. Facebook Twitter. Intermountain Healthcare Apr 2, It can also be a single case in a new area.
A pandemic is an epidemic that travels. Get help with a billing issue. The team members must be selected before departure and they should know their expected roles and responsibilities in the field.
Operational and logistical details must be clear before proceeding to field. Step 2: Establish the existence of an outbreak. An outbreak or an epidemic is the occurrence of more cases of disease than expected in a given area or among a specific group of people over a particular period of time.
To establish the existence of an outbreak, the observed number of cases is compared with the expected number for a certain place or time period. Even if the current number of reported cases exceeds the expected number, the excess may not necessarily indicate an outbreak. Therefore, look for the various factors that may increase the number of cases such as:. Verifying the diagnosis is closely linked to verifying the existence of an outbreak. This is important: a to ensure that the disease has been properly identified, since control measures are often disease-specific; and b to rule out laboratory error as the basis for the increase in reported cases.
A case definition is constructed for the identification of cases. It is a standard set of criteria for deciding whether an individual should be classified as having the health condition of interest.
A case definition includes clinical criteria signs and symptoms and restrictions by time, place, and person. The criteria must be applied consistently to all persons under investigation. Investigators often create different categories of a case definition, such as confirmed, probable, and possible or suspect cases. To be classified as confirmed, a case usually must have laboratory verification. A case classified as probable usually has typical clinical features of the disease without laboratory confirmation.
A case classified as possible usually has fewer of the typical clinical features. Exposure or risk factor should not be included in the case definition. Step 5: Perform descriptive epidemiology Find cases systematically and record information.
In an outbreak situation, cases that prompt the concern are often only a small and do not represent the total number of cases. Therefore, with the help of public health workers, investigator must look for additional cases to determine the true geographic extent of the problem and the populations affected by it.
All the cases should be counted as reported by either passive surveillance patient coming directly to health facility or reported by active surveillance health worker searching for the cases.
Line listing: Information about each person who is listed with concerned disease during an outbreak is created in a tabular form on paper hard copy or on a computer electronic version is termed as line listing. The next step after identifying and gathering basic information about the persons with the disease is to systematically describe some of the key characteristics of those persons in terms of time, place, and person.
This is called descriptive epidemiology. Time: Traditionally, a special type of curve or histogram is used to depict the time course of an epidemic. This graph is called an epidemic curve epi curve. It provides a simple visual display of the outbreak's magnitude and time trend.
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