Epidemiology of Infectious Disease

Course Description

Epidemiology of Infectious Disease addresses the basic principles of epidemiology as they apply to infectious disease and the impact of infectious disease on human civilization. UWF states that the causes and distribution of current epidemics of infectious disease, including newly emerging and reemerging diseases, and the approaches being applied to defeat these diseases will be discussed.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, MCB is the Microbiology prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Public Health, College of Health. It is offered at approximately 4 Florida institutions.

⚠ This is the only course in the MCB prefix taught by the Department of Public Health — the others sit in Medical Laboratory Sciences or in Biology. That placement tells you what the course is: it is not about what a microbe does inside one person, but about what a disease does across a population.

Epidemiology is a way of reasoning, not a body of facts, and it is the way of reasoning that public health runs on. The core questions are ancient and unglamorous — who is getting sick, where, when, and compared with whom — and answering them well has saved more lives than most clinical interventions.

⚠ UWF frames the subject historically as well as technically, naming the impact of infectious disease on human civilization. That is the right frame: plague, smallpox, cholera, influenza, HIV and COVID-19 each reorganised societies, and epidemiology developed largely in response.

The emerging and reemerging disease material is the part that dates fastest and matters most. Antimicrobial resistance, spillover from animal reservoirs, vector range expansion, and declining vaccination coverage are all active rather than historical. Expect the reading list to include material published within the last year.

⚠ Florida is a genuinely instructive place to study this. The state combines a subtropical climate, year-round mosquito activity, very high domestic and international travel volume, a large elderly population, dense tourism, agriculture, and warm coastal waters. Locally acquired dengue and malaria cases, Vibrio vulnificus infections after storms and flooding, and travel-associated importations are all part of Florida's recent record, and none of them are hypothetical.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites and co-requisites, and fee notices. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define epidemiology and describe its scope and uses.
• Describe the historical development of epidemiology.
• Describe the impact of infectious disease on human history and civilisation.
• Apply measures of disease frequency including incidence and prevalence.
• Calculate and interpret rates, ratios, and proportions correctly.
• Apply and interpret attack rates and case fatality rates.
• Describe the epidemiological triad of agent, host, and environment.
• Describe the chain of infection and points of intervention.
• Describe modes of transmission and reservoirs of infection.
• Describe the concepts of incubation period, latency, and infectious period.
• Describe the basic reproduction number and its determinants.
• Explain herd immunity and the herd immunity threshold.
• Describe descriptive epidemiology by person, place, and time.
• Construct and interpret an epidemic curve.
• Distinguish endemic, outbreak, epidemic, and pandemic patterns.
• Describe the major analytic study designs and their appropriate uses.
• Compare cohort and case-control designs and their measures of association.
• Calculate and interpret relative risk and odds ratios.
• Describe bias, confounding, and effect modification.
• Distinguish association from causation and apply causal criteria.
• Describe outbreak investigation and its systematic steps.
• Describe surveillance systems and notifiable disease reporting.
• Describe screening and interpret sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value.
• Describe vaccination programmes and their evaluation.
• Describe emerging and reemerging infectious diseases and their drivers.
• Describe antimicrobial resistance as a population-level problem.
• Describe infectious disease control and elimination strategies.
• Describe ethical and legal issues in infectious disease control.

Optional Outcomes

• Relate course content to a current Florida public health problem.
• Describe antimicrobial resistance as a clinical and public health problem.
• Read and interpret a primary research paper or outbreak report.
• Describe how the material supports graduate or professional study.
• Seek undergraduate research or laboratory experience in the field.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Definition and scope of epidemiology
• Historical development
• Infectious disease and human civilisation
• Measures of disease frequency
• Rates, ratios, and proportions
• Attack rates and case fatality
• Agent, host, and environment
• The chain of infection
• Transmission modes and reservoirs
• Incubation, latency, infectious period
• The basic reproduction number
• Herd immunity
• Descriptive epidemiology: person, place, time
• Epidemic curves
• Endemic, outbreak, epidemic, pandemic
• Analytic study designs
• Cohort and case-control studies
• Relative risk and odds ratios
• Bias, confounding, effect modification
• Association and causation
• Outbreak investigation
• Surveillance and notifiable disease reporting
• Screening, sensitivity, specificity, predictive value
• Vaccination programmes and evaluation
• Emerging and reemerging disease
• Antimicrobial resistance at population level
• Control and elimination strategies
• Ethical and legal issues

Optional Topics

• Florida public health applications
• Antimicrobial resistance
• Primary literature and outbreak reports
• Graduate and professional preparation
• Undergraduate research and laboratory experience

Resources & Tools

• An epidemiology text — Gordis's Epidemiology is the standard introduction and is unusually readable; Nelson and Williams's Infectious Disease Epidemiology is the subject-specific one.
• CDC Principles of Epidemiology in Public Health Practice — free, complete, and excellent. It is the CDC's own self-study course and covers most of this syllabus with worked exercises.
• CDC MMWR — free; outbreak investigations as actually written up. Reading three or four teaches the structure of the field better than any textbook chapter.
• CDC EXCITE and the classic case studies — free; teaching case studies built from real investigations, including Legionnaires' disease and E. coli O157:H7.
• Florida Department of Health surveillance and county health profiles — free; reportable disease data for your own county, and the FL HealthCHARTS query tool.
• WHO Disease Outbreak News — free; the international picture in near real time.
• A spreadsheet, or R with Epi packages — R is free; epidemiology is computational and the calculations are not hard, but they must be practised.
• Nextstrain (nextstrain.org) — free; genomic epidemiology in real time, and the clearest demonstration of how sequence data now supplements classical outbreak methods.
• CDC (cdc.gov) — free; disease pages, treatment guidance, and the MMWR, which is where outbreak investigations are actually published.
• Florida Department of Health (floridahealth.gov) — free; state and county reportable disease data, and the surveillance reports that make this material local.
• A UWF librarian — included in enrolment; an hour on database searching pays for itself across a whole degree.

Career Pathways

• Medical and clinical laboratory technologist (SOC 29-2011) and technician (SOC 29-2012) — ⚠ Florida licenses clinical laboratory personnel through the Department of Health, and licensure requires an approved programme, not merely coursework. Microbiology is one of the core disciplines of the field.
• Microbiologist (SOC 19-1022) — public health laboratories, environmental laboratories, water utilities, food safety, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology quality control.
• Epidemiologist (SOC 19-1041) — generally requires a graduate degree; the Florida Department of Health and county health departments are the principal state employers.
• Infection preventionist — hospital-based, commonly entered from nursing or medical laboratory science, with CBIC certification. Florida's large hospital systems — AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola — all employ them.
• Registered nurse (SOC 29-1141) — microbiology is a prerequisite for essentially every Florida nursing programme, which is why this prefix carries so much enrolment.
• Public health analyst and disease intervention specialist — county health departments across Florida; the state's climate, density, travel volume and mosquito burden make it a genuinely active infectious disease environment.
• Food safety and environmental health inspector — Florida's hospitality and agriculture sectors are large, and both are regulated on microbiological grounds.
• Water quality and environmental microbiology — utilities, springs and estuarine monitoring, and harmful algal bloom response, all substantial in this state.
• Preparation for medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, physician assistant and pharmacy — microbiology is prerequisite or strongly expected for all of them.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ UWF runs THREE separate microbiology routes — make sure you are in the right one

This is the single most important thing to understand about the MCB prefix, and no course title says it. UWF publishes three parallel microbiology sequences, in two different colleges and three different departments, aimed at three different audiences. They are not interchangeable, and enrolling in the wrong one wastes a term.

• ⚠⚠ Only the 3020 route is upper-division and only it opens the rest of the prefix. MCB4203 Microbes & Disease requires MCB3020 and accepts neither of the others. A biology major who takes the health sciences course has not met the requirement.
• ⚠ The prerequisites tell you the level far better than the titles do. MCB3020 requires general chemistry with its laboratory plus a full year of biology or anatomy and physiology; MCB2010 and MCB2010L publish no prerequisites at all. That gap is the real difference between the routes.
• If you are pre-nursing, check which one your programme names. UWF built MCB1000 for the BSN prerequisite explicitly, but nursing programmes at other Florida institutions frequently name MCB2010C instead, and requirements change between catalog years. Ask your advisor and get the answer against your own catalog year.
• ⚠⚠ Transferring in or out, this is where credit goes wrong. All three carry the word "Microbiology," and a transfer evaluator reading titles rather than descriptions can accept a course that does not satisfy the requirement. Carry a syllabus.
• Most Florida institutions run only one or two of these routes, commonly the integrated MCB2010C. UWF running all three is unusual and is what makes the choice a real one here.

⚠⚠ This course sits at the junction of two career pathways

• It is the natural bridge between microbiology and public health. A student arriving from biology gains the population reasoning that laboratory training does not supply; a student arriving from public health gains the biological grounding that policy training does not.
• ⚠ The credential to know about is the MPH. Most epidemiologist posts — including at the Florida Department of Health and at county health departments — expect a Master of Public Health or equivalent graduate training. This course is preparation for that, not a substitute.
• Entry-level routes that do not require a graduate degree exist and are real: disease intervention specialist, epidemiology technician, surveillance analyst, and public health preparedness roles at county health departments. They are also the best way to find out whether the field suits you before committing to graduate study.
• The CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service is the field's best-known training programme; it is postdoctoral or post-master's, and worth knowing exists early.
• ⚠ Infection prevention in hospitals is a substantial and under-advertised career, entered from nursing, medical laboratory science or public health, with CBIC certification. Every large Florida hospital system employs infection preventionists.

⚠⚠⚠ Epidemiology is quantitative — do not be surprised by this

• Rates, risks, odds ratios, confidence intervals and study design occupy a large share of the course. The arithmetic is not advanced, but the reasoning about what a number means is where students actually struggle.
• ⚠ The hardest single idea is confounding, and it is worth deliberate effort: an association that is entirely real can still be entirely misleading about cause.
• Sensitivity and specificity reward the same effort. A highly specific test can still produce mostly false positives when the disease is rare, which is counterintuitive, consequential, and routinely misunderstood in public discussion of testing.
• Practise the calculations rather than reading them. The CDC self-study course is free and built around worked exercises for exactly this reason.

⚠⚠ Public health measures involve real tensions, and this course should name them

• Infectious disease control involves restricting individual liberty for collective benefit — isolation, quarantine, mandatory reporting, vaccination requirements, contact tracing. Every one of these is a genuine ethical trade-off, not an obvious answer.
• Florida law provides specific authority for communicable disease control under the Department of Health, including reporting requirements that name the diseases and the timelines. Knowing what is reportable and how fast is a practical professional competency.
• ⚠ Public trust is an epidemiological variable, not a side issue. Control measures work through voluntary compliance far more than through enforcement, and measures imposed without explanation or without regard for their burden reliably produce less compliance — a lesson repeatedly relearned.
• Infectious disease burden is not distributed evenly. Housing, occupation, access to care and the ability to isolate all shape who gets infected. Treating that as background rather than as part of the epidemiology produces incomplete analysis.

⚠ Offered concurrently with the graduate MCB5273

• UWF teaches this course in the same room as its graduate counterpart, MCB5273, with graduate students assigned additional work.
• ⚠ The undergraduate section is not a lighter course. The lectures, the readings and the examinations are shared; what differs is the extra assignment load on the graduate side. Expect graduate pace.
• This is a genuine advantage if you are considering graduate study — it is an honest preview of the level, and the faculty member teaching it is one who could later write your reference.

⚠⚠ The asterisk in a UWF prerequisite means the course may be taken at the same term

• UWF marks a concurrent course with an asterisk, defined on the catalog's Course Information page as: "This course may be taken prior to or during the same term."
• ⚠ A prerequisite written WITHOUT an asterisk must be completed first; one written WITH an asterisk may be taken in the same term. Reading an asterisked prerequisite as sequential adds a term for no reason.
• UWF also uses an explicit Co-requisite: field, the stricter form — conventionally the same term rather than prior-or-same. Both notations appear in this prefix, and in one case on opposite halves of the same pair.
• The /L notation in a prerequisite — CHM 2046/L, BSC 2011/L — means the course together with its laboratory.
• Confirm with an advisor; the registration system, not the catalog text, is what enforces it.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with examinations.
• ⚠ No "permission is required" marking appears anywhere in the MCB prefix — enrolment is gated by prerequisites rather than by cohort admission. That is not true of the clinical programmes these courses feed into, which admit by cohort.
• UWF publishes no contact hours, lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. Confirm the offering pattern with the department — and note that a course offered in one term only will delay a sequence by a full year if missed.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement, which matters in this prefix more than most — MCB1000, MCB2010 and MCB3020 all teach microbiology, and only MCB3020 is upper division. SCNS equivalency runs on the number and the content, so a course transfers as what it is, not as what its title resembles.

MCB4276 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, through the Department of Public Health, College of Health.