Veterinary Epidemiology

Epidemiology is taught to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. At the undergraduate level, the course is taught to Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM) students in their third-year study. The concept of looking at diseases in a holistic manner is emphasized during these formative stages and the core areas covered include basic definitions in epidemiology and its uses and approaches, disease measures, patterns of disease occurrence, etiology of disease, modes and routes of disease transmission, strategies of disease maintenance in populations, outbreak investigations, disease control/prevention/eradication strategies, important factors to consider when planning disease control/prevention, and animal health schemes. At the postgraduate level, two units are offered.

The first unit is mostly introductory epidemiology taught to students across all the departments in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine while the second unit is mostly on quantitative methods in epidemiology. Core areas covered in the first unit include the basic principles of epidemiology, disease measures, disease causation and simple associations, sampling methods, concepts of confounding/interaction, screening and diagnostic tests, and types of veterinary studies. In the second unit, the core areas include biases in observational studies, identifying and quantifying disease risk factors, determinants of diseases, causal models, confounding/interaction/effect modification, model-building strategies, repeat measures, survival analysis.