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Disease Detectives B/C: Students will use investigative skills in the scientific study of disease, injury, health and disability in populations or groups of people.

Disease Detectives Wiki

Disease Detectives Test Exchange 2018

Past Threads: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

Past Question Marathons: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

I noticed on this year's event description, the section about C level doing advanced statistics is gone, replaced by a requirement they do more on confounding, biases and prevention measures. Does this mean we can stop trying to teach college statistics?!! Probably will be more clear on the new DD CD from Nationals.
They are also are trying to allocate the test emphasis more evenly on Background and Surveillance, Outbreak Investigation and Patterns, Controls and Prevention. If only our state event supervisor would take note of the changes...
Also new, the "5 step Process for Surveillance and the types of Surveillance".

And most importantly, this would normally be the year that the topic would be environmental sources of disease, but there is no mention of a special area to focus on this year under the Description paragraph. Anyone know if we are moving away from doing topics?!

nmsciencemom wrote:I noticed on this year's event description, the section about C level doing advanced statistics is gone, replaced by a requirement they do more on confounding, biases and prevention measures. Does this mean we can stop trying to teach college statistics?!! Probably will be more clear on the new DD CD from Nationals.
They are also are trying to allocate the test emphasis more evenly on Background and Surveillance, Outbreak Investigation and Patterns, Controls and Prevention. If only our state event supervisor would take note of the changes...
Also new, the "5 step Process for Surveillance and the types of Surveillance".

And most importantly, this would normally be the year that the topic would be environmental sources of disease, but there is no mention of a special area to focus on this year under the Description paragraph. Anyone know if we are moving away from doing topics?!

To be fair, I've never had a disease detectives test that included much about the topic (other than some of the foodborne illness tests but even then sometimes it's just the diseases mentioned that change). I love how they made the rules more specific though. All in all, they probably just wanted to change up the event.

On the DD Soinc.org page, it has several 2018 training resources. Will those be updated for 2019 soon? Or are we supposed to just use last year's materials? (I'm talking about the powerpoint presentation, the resource page, and the handout).
Thanks

CCBlazer wrote:On the DD Soinc.org page, it has several 2018 training resources. Will those be updated for 2019 soon? Or are we supposed to just use last year's materials? (I'm talking about the powerpoint presentation, the resource page, and the handout).
Thanks

They should update those for this season soon. I think last year it was uploaded within a month of the rules coming out

So I'm kinda interested in doing this event. Can anyone give me a 1 min summary of what the general idea is like?

platypusomelette wrote:So I'm kinda interested in doing this event. Can anyone give me a 1 min summary of what the general idea is like?

This event is all about epidemiology. In essence, epidemiology is about two things: disease and population. This event involves things like determining the cause of an outbreak, recommending and determining the effectiveness of prevention measures, and learning generally what epidemiologists at the CDC do. I think it's pretty cool.

UTF-8 U+6211 U+662F wrote:

platypusomelette wrote:So I'm kinda interested in doing this event. Can anyone give me a 1 min summary of what the general idea is like?

This event is all about epidemiology. In essence, epidemiology is about two things: disease and population. This event involves things like determining the cause of an outbreak, recommending and determining the effectiveness of prevention measures, and learning generally what epidemiologists at the CDC do. I think it's pretty cool.

So what kind of things would you do on the test?

platypusomelette wrote:

UTF-8 U+6211 U+662F wrote:

platypusomelette wrote:So I'm kinda interested in doing this event. Can anyone give me a 1 min summary of what the general idea is like?

This event is all about epidemiology. In essence, epidemiology is about two things: disease and population. This event involves things like determining the cause of an outbreak, recommending and determining the effectiveness of prevention measures, and learning generally what epidemiologists at the CDC do. I think it's pretty cool.

So what kind of things would you do on the test?

Right, so some things you might be asked to do for this event:

• Calculate statistics to determine if there is a link between a food item and food
• Given the description of an outbreak, summarize the data in an "epi-curve" and generate various hypotheses about where the disease came from and how it is spreading
• Define key vocabulary (this one's pretty boring, I admit)
• Understand various study designs and how they are use in epidemiology to test hypotheses
• Propose prevention measures for an outbreak after determing the cause
• Answer questions about how diseases are transmitted and their natural histories
• Etc.

If you want more detail, you can check out some of the tests on the Test Exchange! Or, if you don't want to commit to this event just yet, you can check out the fun web game put out by the CDC

I was just wondering, this year's topic IS food borne illnesses, right? If it isn't, then what is it?