Biostatistics for Public Health

My health profession is focus on biostatistics. Biostatistics is a branch science of statistics, which is a core discipline in public health. It focuses on developing and applying the statistical techniques and methods to analyzed data to extract necessary information. Its interesting area does not limits to biological science, the research work covers medicine, pharmacy, public health and agriculture.[Wikipedia] As an integral part of public health, biostatistics is responsible for understanding a health event to design experiments, collecting data for the experiments, understanding the collected data and making inferences and interpretations base on the analyzed results. The interpretations could used to forecast a health event, identify any health trends and identify the factors effect the health event. [text book]

Biostatistics could be regarded as the fundamental science of assessment work in the public health text book. Since public health is a science aims at preventing disease and prolonging life on the population level [text book], the ability of understanding, collecting, analyzing and interpreting data is extremely important. For example, when forecasting the outbreak of a seasonal influenza, beside the epidemiology works, the works on the analyze the rule of outbreak timing in the history and the surveillance on the occurrence of case number are all rely on the statistic techniques.[CDC paper] Besides, biostatistics techniques also applied to the yearly vital statistics, which require the biostatisticians to monitor the number of residents in the country. Since the database is very large and many types of data need to be considered, such as the new born infants, the death cases as well as immigrated people, biostatist...

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...ur health professional role, what would you say?

Understanding the public health is important for the future work of biostatistics. First of all, since biostatistics is designed to solve problem in the health and medical area using the statistical methods, we must have a clear idea of the work of public health and therefore we are able to design a good experiment or model to solve problems and provide interest suggestion in practice. Besides, we also need to understand the types of factors the public heath most concerned such as the risks to the health care system, influence factor in the disease transmission and the polluted elements in the environment. Understanding this may help us more strategy on data collection. In the last, since the public health works on solving health problems on the population level, it requires us the ability to work on the big-data.