Advanced Outbreak Investigations

Goals

Upon completion, every participant will be able to:

- Lead a county or state-level outbreak investigation for foodborne, respiratory and most other outbreaks

- Put in place appropriate control measures for outbreaks with known & unknown etiologies

Participants with higher-level training and experience will be able to:

- Initiate and complete investigations that achieve more than description of outbreak scope

- Utilize advanced methods in analyzing outbreak data

- Undertake more nuanced investigations aimed at understanding effectiveness of control measures, conduct complicated tracebacks, and build upon previous findings

Prerequisite: Significant participation in 3-5 outbreak investigations (OI).

Course components:

- Review of basic aspects of OI; What triggers an OI?

-Management of OI teams

- Beyond scope: diverse aims & applications of OIs

-Analytic methods in OIs

- Control measures, general & specific

-Advanced foodborne outbreaks exercise

-Approaches to unknown etiology outbreaks

- Building on experience: sequential investigations

- Conducting tracebacks

-Successes and failures in Covid OIs ( = advanced respiratory Ais)

- Case Study I: OI case control study data analyzed

- Case Study II: OI including multiple (sequential) analytic study analyses

Duration: 3 days

Number of participants: 8-40

In person/remote: Either