What is an outbreak?
Ans: Outbreak is a classification used in epidemiology to describe a small, localized group of people or organisms infected with a disease. An outbreak may be limited to localized increase in the incidence of disease, eg, in a village, town, or closed institution. Outbreaks may also refer to epidemics, which affect a region in a country or a group of countries, or pandemics, which describe global disease outbreaks. Outbreaks may have seasonality or cyclicity. Seasonality is commonly seen in the diseases which are endemic in the areas. Cyclicity is the repeat outbreaks every two or more years. An “epidemic” (from Greek epi- upon + demos people) is a classification of a disease that appears as new cases in a given human population, during a given period, at a rate that substantially exceeds what is “expected,” based on recent experience (the number of new cases in the population during a specified period of time is called the “incidence rate”). Defining an epidemic can be subjective, dep
