Christine,
I echo my colleagues' thanks for your undertaking this diary of an outbreak. We have gone through these steps many times with our field epidemiologists. Most of my personal experience was with Epi6 and I have found that I can do everything I used to do and more with EpiData.
A tip for using the LIST command is that it follows the ECHO setting. I assume you are running programs and have
set echo=off
somewhere. If you put in your program
set echo=on list a b c d if x=y set echo=off
you should get what you want with only a minimum of extra text.
I posted to the listserve (November 2007) a solution to getting a table of frequencies of symptoms. This makes use of the CMD function, which may not be for the casual user, but is very powerful. You can try this. Add the following to the top of your Analysis program:
define sym ________________ global cmd asym count @sym /q if @sym="Y" // or whatever means yes type "@sym: @$count" end
And in your Analysis program, where you want the symptom table:
type "Frequency of symptoms" sym = "Vomit" asym sym = "Diarrhea" asym
There are ways to format this better, but this gives you the information.This can be done without using the CMD statement block, but this keeps the Analysis .pgm file simpler. If you want % of cases with each symptom, see my posting from last November.
Jamie