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2 - How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency

Penny Webb  and
Chris Bain
Penny Webb
Affiliation:
Queensland Institute of Medical Research
Chris Bain
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Summary

Box 2.1 Who drinks the most beer?

According to the Brewers Association of Japan, the Chinese now drink the most beer in the world (28,640 million litres in 2004) followed by the Americans (23,974 million litres). In contrast the Czech Republic ranked a lowly 15th in terms of total consumption (1,878 million litres) and Ireland didn't even make the top 25. This information may be useful for planning production, but do the Chinese and Americans really drink more beer than the rest of us? An alternative and possibly more informative way to look at these data is in terms of consumption per capita. When we do this, the USA falls to 13th position in the ‘beer drinking league table’ (82 litres per capita in 2004) and China falls way off the screen (a mere 22 litres per capita). The Czechs are now the champions (157 litres per capita), followed by the Irish (131 litres per capita) with Germany and Australia, two nations who tend to pride themselves on their beer drinking, ranked in 3rd (116 litres) and 4th (110 litres) place, respectively.

(Source: www.brewers.or.jp, accessed 10 October 2009.)

Many different measures are used by researchers and policy makers to describe the health of populations. You have already met some of these, for example the attack rate which was used to investigate the source of the outbreak investigation in the previous chapter.

Type
Chapter
Information
Essential Epidemiology
An Introduction for Students and Health Professionals
 , pp. 29 - 70
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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