ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book looks at investigating outbreaks of communicable diseases (Nipah, smallpox, and syphilis), and at an intentional infection using anthrax. It presents an investigation regarding cancer, a noncommunicable disease. The book also looks at the experimental designs that epidemiologists and statisticians use to discover the cause of a disease. A key focus of these statistical methods is on the idea of separating a disease signal from noise in data. This could be at an individual level in which a doctor seeks to reach a diagnosis based on laboratory tests that are imperfect for determining whether an outbreak is occurring amid the normal increases and decreases of disease incidence in a population.
