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Field
Epidemiology
Track how diseases spread through populations and work out what slows them down.
What this field studies
Epidemiologists are the detectives of public health. They collect data on who gets ill, where and when, then use models and statistics to find causes, predict outbreaks and evaluate interventions.
Questions researchers are asking
- How many people need to be vaccinated to protect a whole community?
- How fast will an outbreak grow, and when will it peak?
- How can we tell whether something causes disease or is just linked to it?
- How does antibiotic resistance spread between people and places?