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Chasing the Curve
🕵️ Disease Detectives B · Investigation Unit

Outbreak Investigation

Surveillance tells a health department something is wrong. Outbreak investigation is how a Disease Detective figures out exactly what is wrong, who it's hurting, and how to make it stop, using study design, field detective work, disease-tracking tools, and hard numbers.

📗 Topic 2 of 3 · Outbreak Investigation 🎯 9 learning objectives 🧮 Includes worked math examples
🎬 Video Overview · Chasing the Curve · 8:39
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Slide Deck PDF · 15 Slides

Review: Chasing the Curve

The same material as a slide-by-slide deck: good for a class walkthrough or a quick visual review before practice.

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📌 A note on scope: The official rules list two topics here as State & Nationals only: the details of study bias/confounding, and how to calculate herd-immunity thresholds and vaccine effectiveness. This guide gives you just enough of each idea that the vocabulary won't surprise you, but doesn't drill the math, since your team is competing at the regional level.

Chapters

01

Two Ways to Test an Idea

Experimental vs. Observational studies, and the four observational designs

02

The Detective's Checklist

The 10 steps field epidemiologists follow, and how each one feeds the next

03

Building a Case Definition

The Person / Place / Time triad

04

Tools of the Trade

How investigators turn a pile of case reports into a picture they can act on

05

The Chain of Transmission

Agent, Host & Environment, and the six links that connect them

06

Crunching the Numbers

Attack rate, relative risk & odds ratio: the math that turns hypotheses into evidence

07

Proving It's Really the Cause

From Koch's four rules to modern causal models

08

Know Your Suspects

Naming the likely agent from fever, timing, source and who got sickest

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Quick Reference Card

Everything from this unit, condensed for your one-page cheat sheet