Today I am trying to see if I can use Epidata Analysis to do the first three analysis tasks.

1. How many people are sick 2. What is the symptoms profile 3. Epidemic curve

Tasks 1 and 2 are nice and easy.

a) click Analysis b) Click on Frequency c) Select Sick from the Select Variable Menu d) Tick row percentages

I can do the same with the symptoms profile (Diarrhoea, Vomiting etc)

What I don't like is the no comes first on the table that is produced, even though it is a Boolean field. What would be on my 'wish list' is if all the symptoms I select could appear in the one table as exposures do when you select outbreak analysis for attack rates

Epidemic Curve The epidemic curve starts badly. I start by asking for a histogram of diadate (date of onset of diarrhoea) and even though this is a date field (and shows as dates if I do a frequency) the graph shows 76115, 76116 etc on the X axis instead of 27/05/2008, 28/05/2008. Then I remember there is an 'epicurve' graph and this works well. I would like to be able to show diatime on there as well (time of day people were sick) but remember this is not possible yet. Never mind - dates will do for now.

My question for today is - can someone help with some code to create a single onset date? There are two variables - one called diadate and one called vomitdate - the onset date should be whichever one of these is the earliest. We could calculate this manually but it would be great if we could build it in to either epidata (we still have at least 100 records to enter that check code could help with) or epi analysis

Thanks

Christine

Christine Roseveare Analyst Regional Public Health 570 9194 027 495 9671

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epidata-list-request@lists.umanitoba.ca 27/05/2008 5:04 a.m. >>>

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