Characterize disease occurrence in terms of etiologic heterogeneity, disease pathogenesis, or by identifying biological targets for understanding gene environment interactions and novel approaches to therapeutic intervention.
The definition for Highlands J virus indicates that this is not the etiologic agent of disease (disease in horses and turkeys illustrates otherwise).
The global PROGRESS registry was developed and designed with the intention of documenting profiles of disease diagnosis (epidemiologic, etiologic, and baseline disease severity data), patient management, and outcomes in real-life clinical settings across several regions of the world.
The CHAMBER algorithm may have utility in exploring the multifactorial etiology and etiologic heterogeneity in complex disease.
These latter efforts have been inhibited by the predominant biomedical and social science problem-oriented research paradigm, emphasizing reductionist approaches to understanding etiologic mechanisms of diseases and risk factors.
Molecular pathological epidemiology can provide an etiologic framework for diseases, which does allow for etiologic subtyping.
Rickettsia species are obligate intracellular Gram-negative pathogenic bacteria and the etiologic agents of diseases such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF), Mediterranean spotted fever, epidemic typhus, and murine typhus.
Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) O157 H7 is a major etiologic agent of diseases in humans, whose clinical spectrum includes diarrhoea, haemorrhagic colitis, and haemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), the leading cause of chronic renal failure in children in Argentina and several other countries [ 1, 2].
Because each known diarrheal pathogen fulfills Koch's postulates and is capable of being the sole etiologic agent causing disease, multiple pathogens are not essential for causing disease.
While such models offer an excellent portrayal of devastating, late-stage NEC, focus upon only such extreme disease states may offer limited advancement of our understanding of early etiologic triggers of disease.
