This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. The previous editions of the science page are available on our website.
This week’s Science page is a follow-up from the one presented last week and focuses on the difference between incidence rate and incidence risk. Those two epidemiological measurements are often mistaken for one another.
Key points from this week edition:
- Incidence risk is a measure of disease occurrence over a defined period of time. It is a proportion, therefore takes values from 0 to 1 (0% to 100%).
- Incidence rate takes into account the time an individual is at risk of disease. It is not a proportion since it defines the number of cases per animal or farm time at risk.
- Incidence risk and Incidence rate are often confused. Incidence risk and rate are numerically the same when the period at risk does not vary across individuals being studied.
Take a look at the complete report to see an example of the difference between incidence risk and incidence rate on farms.