Re: I have a couple of questions. What exactly is an epidemologist?

Hello,

Well, an epidemiologist is someone who studies epidemics. He finds why an epidemic occured, what factors influences any particular epidemic and try to prevent by education the outbreak of an epidemic.

Of course, an epidemiologist is not just a virologist (too specialized) it is more of a microbiologist who specializes in the highly infectious pathogens (it can be bacterias, parasites, fungi or viruses) that causes epidemics.

An epidemiologist has to know some advanced mathematics (to plot disease progression in a population for example), a lot of microbiology and factors that influences the outbreak of epidemics (movement of a large population, disasters, containment of a number of people in a same place, etc.) An epidemiologist is a sociologist and a microbiologist, he studies the effects of a pathogen on a population instead of just one individual.

So in order to become an epidemiologist, I suggest studying microbiology and specialize on the type of pathogen you want to focus on. You can also study statistics and any sociology class depicting the effects of diseases on populations and vice-versa.

I hope this answers your question,

Thanks for asking,

Mike