Bringing chronic disease epidemiology and infectious disease epidemiology back together

When modern epidemiology first took shape, there was only one kind of epidemiology – epidemiology, period. Over time has come specialisation into chronic and infectious disease epidemiology. Does this segregation into chronic and infectious disease epidemiologies benefit public health? Dividing epidemiology into chronic disease and infectious disease “camps” is, in itself, problematic, in that each is based on an incompatible classification system. One classification is based on cause (infectious and non-infectious diseases) while the second is based on effect (chronic and acute diseases).1 Many chronic diseases have …