This successful book, now in its third edition, continues to provide a comprehensive introduction to the role of epidemiology in veterinary medicine.


Since the publication of the second edition there has been considerable expansion in the application of veterinary epidemiology: more quantitative methods are available, challenges such as the epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe in 2001 have required epidemiological investigation, and epidemiological analyses have taken on further importance with the emergence of evidence-based veterinary medicine.


In this edition:


Completely revised and expanded chapters;
Increased attention given to the principles and concepts of epidemiology, surveillance, and diagnostic-test validation and performance;
Many examples are drawn from both large and small animal medicine, and from the developing as well as the developed world
This paperback edition includes a new section on risk analysis. CONTENTS: From the preface to the first edition; From the preface to the second edition; Preface to the third edition; The development of veterinary medicine; The scope of epidemiology; Causality; Describing disease occurrence; Determinants of disease; The transmission and maintenance of infection; The ecology of disease; Patterns of disease; The nature of data; Surveillance; Data collection and management; Presenting numerical data; Surveys; Demonstrating association; Observational studies; Clinical trials; Diagnostic testing; Comparative epidemiology; Modelling; The economics of disease; Health schemes; The control and eradication of disease; General reading; Appendices

Appendix I: Glossary of terms

Appendix II: Basic mathematical notation and terms

Appendix III: Some computer software

Appendix IV: Veterinary epidemiology on the Internet

Appendix V: Student's t-distribution

Appendix VI: Multipliers used in the construction of confidence intervals based on the Normal distribution, for selected levels of confidence

Appendix VII: Values of exact 95% confidence limits for proportions

Appendix VIII: Values from the Poisson distribution for calculating 90%, 95% and 99% confidence intervals for observed numbers from 0 to 100

Appendix IX: The Chi-squared distribution

Appendix X: Technique for selecting a simple random sample

Appendix XI: Sample sizes

Appendix XII: The probability of detecting a small number of cases in a population

Appendix XIII: The probability of failure to detect cases in a population

Appendix XIV: Sample sizes required for detecting disease with probability, pmin, and threshold number of positives (in brackets) (probability of incorrectly concluding that a healthy population is diseased [in square brackets])

Appendix XV: Probabilities associated with the upper tail of the Normal distribution

Appendix XVI: Lower- and upper-tail probabilities for WX, the Wilcoxon-Mann-

Whitney rank-sum statistic

Appendix XVII: Critical values of T+ for the Wilcoxon signed ranks test

Appendix XVIII: Values of K for calculating 95% confidence intervals for the difference

between population medians fore two independent samples

Appendix XIX: Values of K* for calculating 95% confidence intervals for the difference between population medians fore two related samples

Appendix XX: Common logarithms (log10) of factorials of the integers 1-999

Appendix XXI: The correlation coefficient

Appendix XXII: Some veterinary observational studies

Appendix XXIII: The variance-ratio (F) distribution


References


Index