IDE8201: Infectious Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Response

This course will provide focused training in infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response to for the Students enrolled on the programme. The previous courses have touched some theoretical aspects of this course such as global ethics, advanced public health research methods, and theory and principles of field epidemiology. The quantitative aspects have also been covered in epidemiology and biostatistics. In this course, therefore, we will build on the previous lessons in this specialisation to focus on some very specific skills related to public health surveillance and disease outbreak response. There are short classroom sessions to introduce infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response.  The focus will be field surveillance through which the Students collect surveillance data, conduct analyses on these data, interpretation of time trend data to determine time trends as well as person, place, and time in the context of surveillance data. The Students will be allowed to present surveillance data as previously demonstrated. 
 
Aim  

The overall aim of this course is to train Students on monitoring disease burden and epidemiology of disease and identify outbreaks and new pathogens. 
 
Therefore, using infectious disease surveillance and disease outbreak investigation as tools, the Students will gain knowledge, skills and competences in (1) describing the current burden and epidemiology of disease, (2) monitoring infectious disease trends, and (3) identifying outbreaks and new pathogens. 
 
Course objectives  
At the end of this course, the Students will be well refined in: 

• Infectious disease surveillance at health facilities, community and laboratory.  
• Communications on disease surveillance outcomes. 

 
Expected course outcome 
Application of acquired understanding, knowledge, skills and competences in: 

• Infectious disease surveillance 
• Infectious disease outbreak investigation