What is health?

Descriptive epidemiology is often a first step to exploring possible factors relating to disease occurrence. Learning to examine disease with an epidemiologists’ eye involves looking for patterns in morbidity or mortality in terms of who, where, and when – these key features of disease occurrence can help us to understand the factors that may be related to disease risk. Keep these three guiding characteristics in mind as you examine the plots and participate in this discussion. Review the scenario and plots below then respond to the questions that follow: Images are from the paper from Goodman et al. (1985). Fatalities associated with farm tractor injuries: an epidemiologic study. (Links to an external site.) (*Enlarged Images for better viewing) Please see attached file with images that need to be referenced from Goodman. NOW Do you see any patterns in these plots? Are there particular aspects that seem more important than others? What do these patterns tell us? What might we hypothesize about possible factors leading to tractor-related fatalities? Given what you see, what information might be useful to collect as a next step?