Austin Outbreak Case Study

On July 11, the Texas Department of Health in Austin were notified by a couple of south-central university students of having nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea symptoms. With the concern of a possible outbreak, epidemiologists contacted the local emergency room to discover that within the last 24 hours, 23 university students has gone through the emergency room with gastroenteritis symptoms. With the normal expectancy being 3 cases within a 5 day frame, epidemiologists can agree that there was definitely an outbreak.
In order to investigate and control the outbreak, there are several very important steps that they took. First, they gathered as much cases as they can from local emergency departments in order to determine the population at risk of getting the illness. In order to determine the source of the outbreak, a survey was conduct among the cases to gather data of where they were before the onset of the symptoms. Information from the survey and …show more content…
Since it is a restaurant, food was the prime suspect. They collected data on what each people ate and did not eat along with if they got ill or not. With that information, attack rates were calculated to determine which food caused the outbreak. Cole slaw had the highest attack rate at 88.8% in the groups of people who ate it. In contrast, in the group that did not eat it, cole slaw had the lowest attack rates at 16.7%. The other foods had a high percentage of attack rates too, but it does not stated that they did not have cole slaw as well as those food. By looking at the group that did not eat it, the low rate means that there were fewer people who got ill who did not eat cole slaw, while those that ate it got ill. Therefore, the source of the outbreak was indeed the cole slaw that was served in the restaurant. That means that population that was affected is university students who had cole slaw at that