Fundamentally, we disagree when Hernán sees the purpose of epidemiologic research as specifically to support practice and limits epidemiology to studies that resemble randomized trials.
Examples from the past for such data sources include search engines, social media services, mobile phones, website access logs - all sources that were generating data without the purpose of doing epidemiology.
I would, however, like to offer an additional and much more narrow definition for digital epidemiology that I personally find more appealing and more thought-provoking, namely the following: Digital epidemiology is epidemiology that uses data that was generated outside the public health system, i.e. with data that was not generated with the primary purpose of doing epidemiology.
Sera collected 6 months prior to the current study for the purpose of investigating epidemiology of syphilis in a consecutive series ART and VCT clients were used.
In this article, I examine data collected for the purposes of molecular epidemiology to present three lines of evidence supporting the action of positive selection on M. tuberculosis.
Subsequent Cambodian subtype H5N1 isolates are grouped into closely related phylogenetic sublineages and are denoted by sublineage number (arbitrarily numbered I VII for purposes of molecular epidemiology), and these sublineages are also denoted in the map to show their geographic locations and relationships to likely virus introduction routes.
Sera were originally collected for the purpose of investigating syphilis epidemiology.
For the purpose of defining the epidemiology of AA, we selected articles with data on the prevalence, incidence, and distribution by sex or age.
For the purpose of studying the epidemiology of C. gattii, a broad variety of molecular biological techniques have been developed, including PCR fingerprinting, restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis of the PLB1 and URA5 loci, amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) fingerprint analysis, and several multilocus sequence typing (MLST) approaches (6 – 9 ).
The purpose of this article is to help readers understand the strengths and limitations of epidemiology for the purpose of being better able to interpret these studies.
