Veterinary epidemiology in New Zealand: a 50-year perspective

Abstract

Extract

The science of epidemiology is still developing although some of its principal tenets, such as identification of risk factors through comparisons of rates of disease occurrence among population sub-groups of individuals, have been used for centuries. The past 50 years has seen a particularly rapid period of growth of the discipline that has become almost exponential, especially since microcomputers and powerful analytical programs became widely available in the 1980s. The most outstanding advance has arguably been the development of causal criteria that arose from the fierce debate about links between smoking and lung cancer. The philosophical concepts of associations between cause and effect that are embodied in causal criteria now underpin epidemiological practice for scientific evaluation of evidence.