bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Principles of outbreak investigation
Authors: Iamsirithaworn Sopon , Thammawijaya Panithee , Ungchusak Kumnuan 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Outbreak investigation is an essential function of public health professionals. It is an opportunity to gain new knowledge of diseases and to discover the weaknesses of current public health practices and systems. Unfortunately, most outbreaks are not investigated. This chapter will present the principles and important points about outbreak investigation. The reader will learn about how to detect outbreaks from routine official surveillance and unofficial sources. The reader can assume oneself as an investigator who has to organize the team, review previous knowledge, and prepare the technical and management aspects, before starting the investigation. The reader will learn about the major ten steps in the investigation, with examples, which starts by confirming the existence of the outbreak, verifying the diagnosis, gathering case information, descriptive epidemiology, formulating and testing the hypothesis when necessary, conducting environmental surveys to supplement epidemiological evidence, providing timely on-site reporting of the findings, with practical recommendations to local and national responsible authorities, and communicating risk to health professional community and public. The reader is reminded about the need to follow-up on the recommendations and continue vigorous surveillance of the health problem. The chapter ends by forecasting more joint international investigations to control emerging diseases and new problems. After reading this chapter, the reader should be clear that outbreak investigation is an interesting, challenging, and important task requiring a competent investigator who combines sound scientific knowledge and good management.
Case–control studies
Authors: Weiss Noel S. 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Case–control studies compare ill or injured individuals (cases) with those at risk of the illness or injury (controls) with regard to prior exposures or characteristics, and so appear to proceed backwards, from consequence to potential cause. They have the potential to identify associations that are not causal, either because of chance, or because of the influence of some other factor associated with both the exposure and outcome. However, if a case–control study is able to enrol cases and controls from the same underlying population at risk of the outcome, and can measure exposure status of these persons in a valid manner, the results obtained will closely resemble those of a properly performed cohort study.
Cohort studies
Authors: Muñoz Alvaro , Nieto F. Javier 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
The simplest cohort design is to obtain exposure data at baseline and follow-up individuals to obtain data up to the point when the event of interest occurs. A richer design includes regularly scheduled visits at which data on exposures are updated. The exposures can be either fixed over time (e.g. race), change directly with time (e.g. age and calendar), or change at their own pace (e.g. biological markers). According to the scientific aims of a cohort study, disease occurrence can be measured as an event in person-time, time-to-endpoint of interest, or change in a biomarker repeatedly measured at follow-up visits. Analytical methods include survival analyses to handle censored observations and late entries due to incomplete observation of the development of events and origin, and longitudinal data analyses for the trajectories of markers of disease progression. Stratification, multivariate regression, and causal inference methods are key tools to accomplish comparability among exposed and unexposed groups. Identification of exposures and risk factors for disease provides a basis for prevention strategies. Data from cohort studies can be used to assess the effects of interventions by using data at the individual level to determine individual effectiveness or by comparing occurrence of disease in the population when typically none or only a few are intervened to determine population effectiveness.
Community intervention trials in high-income countries
Authors: Farquhar John W. , Green Lawrence W. 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Community intervention trials in high-income countries. This chapter summarizes results of combined mass media and community organizing methods used and evaluated during the past 40 years to achieve chronic disease prevention through changes in behaviour and risk factors. These studies are examples of experimental epidemiology and community-based participatory research, using cost-effective health promotion methods. The chapter also reviews earlier experiences in public screening, immunization, family planning, HIV/AIDS, and tobacco control, which provided useful theory and methods on which the later trials built. Major advances in theory development and intervention methods occurred in the 1970s from two pioneering community intervention projects on cardiovascular disease prevention from Stanford (USA) and Finland. These projects, followed in the 1980s and beyond in North America, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, added many major lessons in both theory and practice. These lessons, considered ‘operational imperatives’, are: economic, social normative (or ‘denormalization’), informed electorate, public health, surveillance, comprehensiveness, formative, ecological, and logical sequencing of needs and action. Therefore, these recent decades of applying ‘total community’ health promotion in developed countries achieved considerable change at reasonable cost. Such communities were changed greatly through organizing and education; changes requiring advocacy, activism, partnership building, leadership, and regulations. This results in community transformation, creating ‘community efficacy’, a composite of enhanced self-efficacy of the community’s residents and leaders. Such transformed communities, as models, allow leverage in disseminating methods, including regulatory tactics. Such dissemination can lead to national changes analogous to those of the recent decade’s tobacco control successes.
Causation and causal inference
Authors: Hoggatt Katherine J. , VanderWeele Tyler J. , Greenland Sander 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
This chapter provides an introduction to causal inference theory for public health research. Causal inference can be viewed as a prediction problem, addressing the question of what the likely outcome will be under one action vs. an alternative action. To answer this question usefully requires clarity and precision in both the statement of the causal hypothesis and the techniques used to attempt an answer. This chapter reviews considerations that have been invoked in discussions of causality based on epidemiologic evidence. It then describes the potential-outcome (counterfactual) framework for cause and effect, which shows how measures of effect and association can be distinguished. The potential-outcome framework illustrates problems inherent in attempts to quantify the changes in health expected under different actions or interventions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how research findings may be translated into policy.
Systematic reviews and meta-analysis
Authors: Siegfried Nandi , Mbuagbaw Lawrence 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Systematic reviews play an important role in healthcare decision-making. When conducted correctly, they provide up-to-date, comprehensive, and replicable summaries of evidence. Authors of systematic reviews are expected to develop a protocol that outlines the research question and key methodological features of their review. A comprehensive and exhaustive search should be conducted, followed by screening to capture studies that meet the prespecified inclusion criteria. Once the relevant studies have been identified, data will be extracted, using a dedicated tool that permits the review authors to confirm the eligibility of the study and collect information on its design, risk of bias, and results. Sufficiently similar data may be pooled using meta-analytic techniques or synthesized narratively. A summary of the overall quality of evidence for each outcome is an essential component of a systematic review. The main concerns with systematic reviews are (1) selection bias: systematic exclusion of relevant studies due to publication status or language; (2) indexing bias: failure to identify relevant studies because they are not indexed accurately; and (3) information bias: missing or inaccurate information in the included studies. Other approaches to evidence synthesis include mapping the evidence with scoping reviews; conducting overviews of systematic reviews; using individual patient data; conducting network meta-analyses for multiple comparisons; conducting rapid reviews when evidence is needed urgently; synthesis of diagnostic accuracy data; and synthesis of qualitative data. Systematic reviews often inform clinical guidelines and require careful planning and execution by teams with content and methodological expertise.
Measuring the health of populations
Authors: Vos Theo , Murray Christopher J.L. , Lopez Alan D. 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Over the last two decades, the global health landscape has undergone rapid transformation. People around the world are living longer than ever before, and populations are getting older. Many countries have made remarkable progress in preventing child deaths. As a result, disease burden is increasingly defined by disability as opposed to being dominated by premature mortality. The leading causes of death and disability are shifting from communicable diseases in children to non-communicable diseases in adults. These global trends differ across regions and by level of development. Notably, in sub-Saharan Africa, communicable, maternal, and newborn diseases and nutritional deficiencies continue to dominate. While low- and middle-income countries are tackling this ‘unfinished agenda’ of largely poverty-related diseases, increasingly they also need to prepare their health services for a growing burden of non-communicable diseases and injuries. In high-income countries, health budgets are steadily increasing relative to gross domestic product due to ageing of the population, an ever-expanding array of medical technologies, and greater demands of consumers for healthcare services. For governments and other healthcare providers to be able to respond to these challenges, high-quality comparable data on the size and trends in mortality and morbidity are essential. In 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010, which endeavoured to rethink methods and assumptions underlying population health measurement while making use of the vastly improved health data and computational resources. This chapter describes the methods underlying the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study.
Mathematical models of transmission and control of infectious agents
Authors: Welte Alex , Schalkwyk Cari van 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Indeed, the ‘heavy lifting’ of healthcare is in the care of patients, the development and distribution of vaccines, drugs and devices, and the conception and implementation of sensible systems and policies. However, in recent decades, spectacular increases in the availability of computational capacity have paved the way for mathematical modelling to play an ever-increasing role in many aspects of public health, by supporting formal analyses at various scales of the processes involved. This chapter explores a particular kind of ‘modelling’—and it is not the common (bio)statistical kind. We focus on what we would call ‘dynamical’ modelling (as opposed to ‘statistical’ modelling). This essentially entails the reduction, to mathematics, of key facts and principles inherent in the ‘processes’ or ‘mechanisms’ in an epidemiological situation. We can then manipulate these mathematical constructs, in search of insights that, while ultimately implied in the model construction, are not superficially apparent from our primary data and our intuition.
Life course epidemiology and analysis
Authors: Rose Mayeda Elizabeth , Binder Alexandra M. , Kobayashi Lindsay C. 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Life course epidemiology approaches disease aetiology and prevention from the perspective of risk and protective factors that influence health and disease throughout the lifespan. The integration of a life course approach to epidemiologic research is central for identifying effective policies and programmes to promote population health and health equity. This chapter will introduce life course concepts and models and analytical approaches for research on life course determinants of health. It will discuss threats to causal inference, approaches for overcoming these difficulties, and future directions in life course epidemiology. For example, in addition to expanding epidemiologic research with a life course perspective to include people with diverse life experiences, new areas of development include life course research extending beyond one human lifespan to include intergenerational and transgenerational life course research, as well as the application of innovative methods.
Demography and public health
Authors: Grundy Emily , Murphy Michael 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
The health and healthcare needs of a population cannot be measured or met without knowledge of its size and characteristics. Demography is the scientific study of population and is concerned both with the measurement, or estimation, of population size and structure and with population dynamics—the interplay between fertility, mortality, and migration which determines population change. These are pre-requisites for making the forecasts about future population size and structure which largely determine the health profile of a population and should underpin public health planning. This chapter presents information on demographic methods and data sources, their application to health and population issues, information on demographic trends and their implications, and the major theories about demographic change. The aim is to illustrate and elucidate the complex inter-relationship between population change and human health.
Health promotion, health education, and the public’s health
Authors: Baum Fran 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Health promotion is a complex, ambiguous concept and set of practices. While many have linked it, primarily, to a revolution in health education, its roots go much deeper into the history of public health. It had its contemporary beginnings in the throes of the backlash against bureaucratic and professional dominance exemplified by the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. At its heart, health promotion is centred on the values and principles of equity, participation, and empowerment. These concepts are embedded in health promotion’s founding document, the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. However, exactly how these values are articulated is often ambiguous. In this chapter, the authors contend that health promoters must intensify their reflection on these core values and principles; particularly in the light of the tendency to slip back into a comfortable paternalism, which reinforces existing power imbalances. We are specifically concerned with the precise interpretation of health equity in health promotion.
Toxicology and environmental risk analysis
Authors: Koh David , Lin Ro-Ting 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Risk-based decision-making increasingly has global dimensions, extending from the international management of chemical risks to the sustainable development of our planet. Environmental risk analysis is firmly based on toxicological sciences with input from other public health disciplines. Increasing understanding of how the human genotype and phenotype affects absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of xenobiotics (compounds foreign to a living organism), is providing insight into answers to the oldest human question about disease: ‘Why me?’ The risk paradigm components of hazard assessment, dose–analysis, exposure assessment, risk characterization, risk management, and risk communication, and the toxicological concepts on which they are based, have proven durable in approaching increasingly complex environmental hazards. Newer approaches to managing risk, such as the precautionary principle, and newer challenges, such as nanotechnology and genetically modified organisms, necessitate further systematic thinking on how best to protect human health and the environment.
Physical activity and public health
Authors: Hadgraft Nyssa T. , Owen Neville , Dempsey Paddy C. 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
There are well-established chronic disease prevention and broader public health benefits associated with being physically active. However, large proportions of the adult populations of developed countries and rapidly urbanizing developing countries are inactive. Additionally, many people’s lives are now characterized by large amounts of time spent sitting—at work, at home, and in automobiles. Widespread urbanization, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, has resulted in large segments of traditionally active rural populations moving into cities. Many previously manual tasks in the occupational and household sectors have become automated, making life easier and safer in many respects. However, a pervasive consequence of these developments is that large numbers of people globally are now going about their daily lives in environments that place them at risk of overweight and obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other health problems. This represents a formidable set of public health challenges. In this context, the present chapter describes: key definitions and distinctions relating to physical activity, exercise, and sedentary behaviour; current evidence on relationships physical inactivity and sitting time with health outcomes, and associated public health recommendations; prevalence and trends in physical activity and sedentary behaviours, and some of the key issues for surveillance and measurement; and, how physical activity and sedentary behaviour may be understood in ways that will inform broad-based public health approaches. An interdisciplinary and intersectoral strategy is emphasized. This requires working with constituencies beyond the public health field, such as urban planning, architecture, occupational health and safety, and social policy.
Public mental health and suicide
Authors: Wasserman Danuta , Wahlbeck Kristian 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
The full public health impact of mental health is largely unrecognized. The allocation of the burden of disease attributable to mental and behavioural disorders, which is already substantial, will probably increase steadily in the future, due to the transition of the global disease burden towards mental and behavioural disorders. In addition to the demands that mental disorders put on social welfare and health systems, they also cause decreased productivity in the workplace, prolonged disability, and diminished resources within families. Mental disorders are linked to socioeconomic disadvantages and addressing mental health determinants will reduce health inequalities. Stigma of mental disorders is widespread, and it is a barrier for help-seeking behaviours, as well as the development of healthcare services. Modern mental health policies should aim at improving psychosocial health by addressing determinants of mental health in all public policies. Key measures in effective public health suicide prevention programmes comprise improved awareness in the population about mental health promotion and suicide preventive measures, the restriction of access to lethal means of suicide, responsible media coverage of suicide issues, school-based awareness programmes, and improvements in the identification of depression and suicidality by peers, gatekeepers, and health professionals. Modern community-based mental health services, with a diversified service provision, result in better outcomes on a broader scale compared to ‘old school’ hospital-centred mental health service systems. Primary care physicians in collaboration with multidisciplinary teams have a central role in provision of mental health services to the population.
Dental public health
Authors: Mohamed Amira S. , Robinson Peter G. 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Dental public health is concerned with preventing oral disease, promoting oral health, and improving the quality of life through the organized efforts of society. Oral diseases including dental caries, periodontal disease, oral neoplasms, and dentofacial trauma are common, have a significant impact on individuals and wider society, and are largely preventable. While the prevalence and severity of these most common and costly dental diseases have fallen in most developed countries, oral health inequalities exist in relation to socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or region. The links between oral and general health indicate that strategies to improve both sets of problems and reduce inequalities should be integrated within the framework advocated by the Commission for the Social Determinants of Health. Of particular relevance to oral health are increasing the availability of fluoride and ensuring universal access to quality dental services. Factors influencing oral health in the future include tighter financial pressures, changes in disease prevalence, the deprofessionalization of dentistry, the role of consumerism in oral health, and the need for a better evidence base.
Musculoskeletal disorders
Authors: Barrero Lope H. , Caban-Martinez Alberto J. 
Published: December 2021

Abstract
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are a major public health burden ranking third in terms of the causes of disability among persons worldwide. Since the seventies, life expectancy at birth around the world has risen roughly by 13 years for women and 12 years for men, creating a greater probability of experiencing some type of MSD during the life course. In this chapter, we first introduce the definition and classification structure of musculoskeletal disorders and provide a comprehensive description of selected MSDs (i.e. low back pain, neck pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis) of major concern to public health research and practice. We then transition the discussion on a global scale, to the incidence and prevalence of MSDs, their economic impact, and growing burden on society. There are various known modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors of MSDs that will also be discussed including an emphasis on the presence and influence of ageing and obesity on MSDs. Lastly we summarize future directions in terms of research, practice, and policy that can be implemented and developed to improve the global burden of musculoskeletal disorders. In the advent of a large ageing population and increased life expectancy, the burden of musculoskeletal disorders can be expected to increase globally.