The course will be delivered by EpiConcept, from 15th February to 5th March 2010 in the training centre “Les Pensières”, Centre des conferences, 55, route d’Annecy, F-74290 Veyrier du Lac, France.

The course will cover the following topics:

• surveillance (principles, design, evaluation, analysis)
• outbreak investigation (plan, design, data collection, validation and analysis)
• survey (questionnaire and sampling techniques)
• analytical epidemiology (concepts, designs, analysis, multivariate analysis, alternative designs)
• communication (visual aids, oral presentation, outline of manuscript and critical review)

The teaching approach combines lectures, case studies (tabletop and computerised), short presentations of participants and videos. Necessary skills will be acquired through small working groups of 6 -10 participants with one or two facilitators per group. Practical exercises are based on real investigations. For some of the practical exercises, each participant will work on his/her own computer connected to internet. Twice a week tutorials will be organised and participants are encouraged to bring their own data to work in special sessions. The course will be given in English.

The target audience for the course are persons involved in field epidemiology activities at national or regional level in the European Union, EU candidate countries and the EEA/EFTA countries. Course participants may include young or mid career public health professionals (mostly medical epidemiologists) with at least basic experience in surveillance and in field outbreak investigation, preferably with an intermediate level of English. Participants should bring their own computer.

ECDC calls for participants for this specific course. The course targets participants, from the European Union, EU candidate countries and the EEA/EFTA countries. We assume that the appropriate candidate is working in one of the areas targeted by the course. In order to select the most appropriate candidate we are addressing competent bodies for training, for response and for surveillance with a request to disseminate this information.

All interested candidates will register before 6th December 2009 through the web based registration form at:
http://epiet.viadesk.net/do/surveyfrontwrite/?id=142919-767379737572

The deadline for registration is December 6, 2010 at 23:00 CET. Details of registered candidates will be forwarded to the ECDC Competent Bodies for Training of the respective nationalities, in order to provide ECDC with advice on priority of participation.”

Invitation letter to the second 3-week course on ‘Introduction to Intervention Epidemiology’