How does the health department study such an outbreak?
The first thing the public health workers do is to try to figure out what kind of outbreak it is. Some outbreaks are food borne (hepatitis A, salmonellosis, shigellosis); some are air borne (influenza, Legionnaire’s disease); and others are transmitted by insects such as mosquitoes (encephalitis, dengue). Since the students seemed to have food poisoning, public health workers are doing studies to see what type of germ (bacteria, virus, parasite) might have caused the outbreak.
