ABSTRACT
This chapter describes common epidemiological measures. It recognizes how disease patterns are affected by modernization. The chapter explains why heart disease and obesity have complex causes that include social factors. It also defines a pandemic and reviews the social features of AIDS and influenza. Several analytic concepts assist the epidemiologist in describing the health problems of human groups. As a method of measuring diseases in human aggregates, epidemiology has been a relatively recent development. The bubonic plague, which ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1750, marks one of the worst epidemic afflictions in all human history. Epidemics like the plague have existed for centuries, but the field of epidemiology did not develop as a form of systematic scientific investigation until the nineteenth century. The term social environment in epidemiological research refers to living conditions, such as poverty or crowding, and also to the norms, values, and attitudes that reflect a particular social and cultural context of living.
