Description: Public health strives to improve the health of human populations, and prevent disease, disability, and death. Statistics--the science of finding underlying patterns by analyzing variability and errors in collected data--is essential to the understanding of disease patterns in human populations. Other quantitative methods, such as economics, decision theory, and mathematics, now constitute integral parts of the scientific basis for priority-setting and evaluation inpublic health. This book provides a broad conceptual treatment of the statistical issues underlying core public health functions: outbreak investigations, policy development, economic andprogram evaluation, managed care, and program operations. The theoretical analysis is illustrated with examples from public health practice. For readers interested in a more detailed treatment, there are extensive references to specialized publications. The authors present a series of quantitative approaches that significantly help public health professionals solve the problems they confront in their day-to-day work. Unlike traditional how-to books in statistics, this volume startswith an overview of the range of problems encountered in public health practice, and then presents methods for facilitating decision making. Statistics in Public Health: Quantitative Approaches toPublic Health Problems will serve as a comprehensive desk reference for public health practitioners and as a teaching text for students of public health.

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