• epidemiology

A large proportion of the submissions we receive for this journal fall in the broad category of descriptive epidemiology. Practitioners around the world collect data through routine methods or cross sectional surveys, look for distinctive patterns and trends, and decide to inform others. Sometimes this kind of report is of great value—for example, reports of new outbreaks of syphilis in the 1990s,¹ or even the first case series that heralded the arrival of AIDS.^2, …