Talk:Prevalence/Archive 1

Unititled
This article needs to make up its mind and either use "at a designated moment in time" or "during a PERIOD(!) of time" whichever may be the correct definition consistently.

Seriously, what a mess!
yo wazzup

Prevalence can also be a number as well as a ratio
Prevalence is also "The total number of cases of a given disease in a specified population at a designated time." Prevalence - Glossary Entry - Genetics Home Reference or go to MeSH Browser at the National Library of Medicine Petersam 06:12, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

An example of both total numbers and ratios is the WHO TB page at http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/ Petersam 07:16, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

The Different Kinds of Prevalence
I think there should be a discussion of the kinds of prevalence in this article: point, lifetime, etc. I wish I knew them all, but I remember a good 5 or so different kinds of prevalence from my stats course. Sweaterman (talk) 17:21, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

....and now I've been using the word in nonmedical writing
I've occasionally used the word "prevalence" to refer to the portion of people exhibiting a given travel behavior, such as driving to work. This originated when I researched the relationship between exercise, health, and bicycle riding and walking, and a lot of the research in this area came from medical reseachers. So, of course, I picked up the word "prevalence" and I find it useful... &mdash; Rickyrab | Talk 04:35, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

The ratio formula
In my opinion the ratio formula is pretty misleading, because $b is defined as the number of individuals that are at risk of developing the disease. This does not reflect the whole population however. It would be more reasonable to say prevalence = number of diseased / size of population. But I guess it is clear that is possible to define prevalence for specific subpopulations as indicated in the article, which would be the case for the subpopulation a+b. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.19.102.52 (talk) 11:41, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Alters of prevalence
Apart from duration of disease (already enlisted), another alterator of prevalence, is the efficacy of the test - if it can increase identification of disease, this will also increase prevalence 129.180.166.53 (talk) 06:58, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Criminology and link with Incidence
This article at the moment isn't complete, in my opinion. Disregarding the current errors, there needs to be a link to Incidence and Prevalence as criminological terms.