MOC - Public Health & Epidemiology

How infections behave in populations — surveillance, outbreak investigation, prevention, and the governance around them.

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Computational partners: MOC - Bioinformatics in Microbiology · MOC - AI in Microbiology

Overview

Clinical microbiology answers “what does this patient have?”; epidemiology answers “who else, where, why now, and how do we stop it?” Genomics has merged the two: the same isolate that guides therapy also becomes a surveillance data point.

flowchart LR
  Case[Case / isolate] --> Lab[Laboratory confirmation]
  Lab --> Seq[[Whole-Genome Sequencing]]
  Lab --> Notify[Notification / reporting]
  Seq --> Clust[[MLST and cgMLST]]
  Clust --> Inv[Outbreak investigation]
  Notify --> Signal[[AI for Outbreak Detection]]
  Signal --> Inv
  Inv --> Act[Control measures]
  Act --> Eval[Impact evaluation]

Key Subtopics

Measuring disease

• Epidemiology — incidence, prevalence, R₀/Rt, study designs, outbreak investigation steps

Surveillance

• Passive vs active; sentinel and syndromic systems
• Genomic surveillance — Phylogenomics and Outbreak Typing · Phylodynamics · Viral Genomics and Surveillance
• Automated signal detection — AI for Outbreak Detection
• Wastewater and environmental monitoring

Prevention and control

• Vaccination and herd immunity — Edward Jenner
• Infection Prevention and Control — precautions, device bundles, hospital outbreaks
• Water, sanitation, food safety
• Outbreak response and communication

AMR at population scale

• MOC - Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) surveillance networks
• Antimicrobial Stewardship as a population intervention — AI in Antimicrobial Stewardship
• One Health — human, animal, environmental reservoirs
• ESKAPE Pathogens — the priority organism set

Data governance

• FAIR Data and Genomic Surveillance
• Public Sequence Databases
• AI Ethics in Clinical Microbiology

Core Concepts

• A cluster in time and space is a hypothesis; genomics tests it
• Surveillance quality is limited by metadata, not sequencing
• Interventions must be evaluated, not assumed
• Prevention (vaccines, hygiene) usually outperforms treatment at population scale

Related MOCs

• MOC - Clinical Microbiology · MOC - Diseases by System · MOC - Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) · MOC - Virology · MOC - Immunology

Build Status

Cluster	Status
MOC scaffold	done
Genomic surveillance links	done
Core notes: Epidemiology, Infection Prevention and Control, Vaccination, One Health	done
Outbreak investigation worked example; food/water-borne disease notes	backlog