Descriptive and Analytic Epidemiology

Designing an Epidemiologic Study to Test the Hypothesis

To test the hypothesis on the source of the outbreak, a case-control study was conducted from July 21-27. Thirty-one of the initial 38 persons meeting the original case definition (i.e., those not used in hypothesis generating interviews) were included as cases. It was decided that two controls would be selected for every case and would be matched to the case by age group (0- decision to match on age group and gender? Why or why not?
3. Over what time period would you examine exposures to possible risk factors for cases? For controls?