Updated book reflects advances in infectious disease epidemiology
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* Charlotte Tucker

Only five years have passed since the last time editors updated “Infectious Disease Epidemiology,” but so much has happened in that time that a new edition has become necessary.

Today, there is talk of ending the HIV epidemic, and studies of many new prevention trials have been published in recent years. Problems with antibiotic-resistant bacteria are growing and new infections have been recognized.

“Infectious Disease Epidemiology,” edited by APHA member Kenrad Nelson, MD, professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Carolyn Masters Williams, PhD, MPH, chief of the epidemiology branch at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, seeks to chronicle all of those issues and more in a format intended for both students and public health professionals. At more than 900 pages, the book is large, but Nelson said one of his goals was to make it readable by providing specifics about various diseases and how they manifest.

“You have to interest people,” he told *The Nation’s Health*. “One of the issues in this field is that some of the books are books of formulas…That’s interesting to people who focus on that, but for a book like this it’s better to have some specifics.”

Nelson said the book, which is co-published by APHA Press and Jones & Bartlett Learning, will be useful to schools of public health and schools of medicine that teach epidemiology of infectious diseases or infectious disease prevention.

“Instead of just being a general book, it has a lot of specifics and specific examples,” he said. “Students don’t have to go through chapter by chapter. In some instances there will be one or two or three or half a dozen (chapters) that will be useful for a course.”

Since its debut, the book has been used broadly in public health schools as well as in medical and veterinary programs.

In the third edition, virtually all of the chapters have been updated, and two have been added, Nelson said.

![Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/43/4/4.3/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/43/4/4.3/F1)

The chapter on hepatitis now includes “remarkable” new findings and a discussion why certain populations have more trouble with hepatitis C than other populations, Nelson said.

The infectious disease dynamic chapter also underwent extensive revisions, including an expanded discussion of new concepts on modeling.

The first of the two new chapters covers overall methods of prevention of infectious disease, a topic Nelson said is important because other texts often focus on a specific area, such as sexual transmission.

“I thought we needed to review all of the major methods of prevention of transmission, including airborne, food- and waterborne, contact and transfusion,” Nelson said.

The other new chapter focuses on transmissible spongiform encepha-lopathies, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, more commonly known as mad cow disease, and human diseases such as kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, many of which were originally thought to be genetic rather than infectious.

“These have challenged ideas among biologists,” Nelson said. “So we had to include them.”

For more information or to order a copy of the book, visit [www.aphabookstore.org](http://www.aphabookstore.org).

*   Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association