I saw an earlier thread on the list suggesting a date time variable in epi analysis or the option to show two variables such as day and hours in an epicurve. I would find this very helpful as for an outbreak I was asked to produce an epi curve, preferably grouped in 3 hourly lots, but certainly showing both date and hour of onset on one graph.

The outbreak data was entered into Epidata and as Epidata doesn't have a datetime field information about when people first became sick was stored in two different fields - onsetday (a date field) and onsettime (a numeric field entered as a 24 hour clock). There are three different onset days and a range of onsettimes in each day. I couldn't think of a way of putting both pieces of information on one graph in either epidata analysis or epi info (though in epi info you can group the hours and it will make you a different graph for each day), so finally I exported the data to Excel, grouped the data manually and then graphed it that way.

Does anyone have a better suggestion about how to make an epicurv that includes both date and time information?

thanks

Christine

Christine Roseveare Analyst Regional Public Health 570 9194 027 495 9671