“Remarkable achievements have been accomplished in the control of many epidemic infectious diseases in this century.” —American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs “AIDS does not stand alone; it may well...

THESE WORDS, WRITTEN by a man from the Italian city of Siena, are one of many heartrending descriptions left by survivors of the epidemic of bubonic plague that scoured Europe, North Africa, India, and Asia in the mid–fourteenth century. That...

Public health broadly combines efforts towards ensuring physical health through medical research, city planning, regulations in the workplace, and sanitation. The field of public health emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to a surge of...

Epidemics are outbreaks of disease of bacterial or viral origin that involve many people in a localized area at the same time. An example of an epidemic is the hemorrhagic fever outbreak caused by the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976. When Ebola fever...

An epidemic is the occurrence of an illness among a large number of people in the same geographical area at the same time. Bacterial epidemics have probably been part of the lives of humans since the species evolved millions of years ago. Certainly by...

An epidemic is an outbreak of a disease that involves a large number of people in a contained area (e.g., village, city, country). An epidemic that is worldwide in scope is referred to as a pandemic. A number of viruses have been responsible for...

Epidemic, from the Greek meaning "prevalent among the people," is most commonly used to describes an outbreak of an illness or disease in which the number of individual cases significantly exceeds the usual or "expected" number of cases in any given...

Epidemic, from the Greek meaning "prevalent among the people," is most commonly used to describes an outbreak of an illness or disease in which the number of individual cases significantly exceeds the usual or "expected" number of cases in any given...

In epidemiology, an epidemic (from Greek epi- upon + demos people) is a classification of a disease that appears as new cases in a given human population, during a given period, at a rate that substantially exceeds what is "expected," based on recent...