The critical importance of epidemiology in public health and professional education.

The author discusses the uses of epidemiology in identifying underserved populations and the positive impact of preventive health care on poverty and social distress. The U.S.

AIDS, policy analysis, and the electorate: the role of schools of public health.

Current debates concerning appropriate policy to combat the epidemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have raised critical questions regarding the role that schools of public health and individual public health professionals should play, if any, in AIDS-related policy analysis and social advocacy. In the summer of 1986, the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley initiated a telegram sent by the Deans of all 23 schools of public health to protest US Department of Justice AIDS policy and, in the subsequent fall, the school expanded its public educational role in an unprecedented manner by initiating and issuing, with California's other three schools of public health, a policy analysis of Proposition 64, the LaRouche AIDS Quarantine Initiative. That analysis exposed the proposition's fallacious claims regarding casual transmission of AIDS and served to educate the electorate on the likely public health impact of this deleterious legislation.

Teaching community-oriented primary care (COPC): a practical approach.

To improve education in community-oriented primary care (COPC) and to promote its practice in the community, the University of California's School of Public Health in Berkeley and School of Medicine in San Francisco are collaborating in an innovative program in cooperation with several federally-funded community clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. The School of Public Health designed a COPC track for graduate public health students from various departments of the school who wished to work in community health care. The track includes a seminar given in the spring of the students' first year in which COPC theory is taught and teams of students working with a faculty advisor and a clinic preceptor design COPC projects for the primary care sites.

St. Louis encephalitis: the Chicago experience.

The largest laboratory-documented outbreak of St. Louis encephalitis (SLE) in the United States occurred in the Chicago metropolitan area in the summer and early fall of 1975. Of 1,456 illnesses investigated, 326 cases of confirmed or probable SLE and 420 cases of suspected SLE were found in the six-county area.