Either way, we need to investigate to determine why it is happening and how to prevent other people from getting sick or dying. The disease may be something doctors have already seen before just in a new form or abnormally high numbers, such as foodborne or healthcare-associated infections, or it may be an emerging disease that we don’t know much about like SARS. An outbreak, or epidemic, occurs when there are more cases of disease than would normally be expected in a specific time and place.
Hollywood has done their best to capture what an outbreak is…but here are the facts. What do you think of when you hear the word “outbreak”? Maybe you envision a population decimated by a terrible, novel, and incurable disease like in the aformentioned movie Contagion or you think of Dustin Hoffman roaming around California in a blue biocontainment suit with Rene Russo trying to protect folks from a tiny monkey and narrowly preventing an airstrike by the US military? With the approaching release of the movie Contagion, I thought it would be appropriate to post my cheat sheet on how to investigate a disease outbreak.
