Week 5: Tracking infection
Introduction
How can one use antibodies to track infection? This week we start to look into the field of serology, the use of antibodies to identify infectious agents or diagnose disease. You will also start to learn some epidemiology, the study of disease in populations and how they spread.
Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 1 Introduction to Week 5
Transcript: Audio 1 Introduction to Week 5
DAVID MALE:
Epidemiology is the study of how diseases spread in populations. It is complicated because each disease is different. It will be simpler for us as we are just looking at COVID-19. But even looking at one disease, it varies between countries, and different groups of people, according to social, environmental, genetic and demographic differences. Serology, which is the study of antibodies, can help us understand what proportion of the population have been infected. Antibodies persist, long after an acute infection has passed, so they act as a marker of whether a person has previously contacted an infectious agent.
You have already measured antibodies to SARS CoV2 in the virtual ELISA laboratory. This week you will extend your investigation of serum samples in the virtual ELISA laboratory, to distinguish people who have been vaccinated from those that have been infected. You will also see how serology can inform epidemiological studies.
Audio 1 Introduction to Week 5
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By the end of this week, you should be able to:
- understand the difference between disease incidence and prevalence
- calculate disease incidence from data provided
- outline how serology can inform epidemiological studies
- identify SARS-CoV2 infected individuals in the virtual laboratory by detection of N-antibodies and estimate the cumulative level of infection in the population.