Community Trial: Outcome

The meaning of a community trial as a type of experimental epidemiological study design is an intervention study whereby the investigator allocates an exposure and observes the development of the result. For this reason, a community trial is a type of analytical study design. This type of study has the following characteristics: 1) It involves an investigator assembling groups of people for the particular goal of analytically establishing the condition regarding the existence of the risk of disease in the sense of whether it is different for those persons who are exposed or not exposed to an element of interest. 2) It has a suitable comparison group that facilitates hypothesis testing. 3) It is resource exhaustive. 4) It is suitable for computing measures of association. Community trial is often utilized by pharmaceutical companies when testing new drugs. An example of this is a time when the United States dreaded poliomyelitis as a childhood disease that had no cure. This disease thrived during the hot weather of the late summer when rashes of new cases would begin. Jane Smith illustrated the rapidity at which the disease epidemics became common phenomena. By the time people had heard about it, more than 27,000 had become paralyzed with 9,000 deceased, and all summers passed with epidemic incidences (Michigan Center for Public Health, 2010). Dr, Jonas Salk came up with a promising vaccine against the disease. A massive study was conducted. It comprised 1.8 million subjects and had thousands of volunteers in three countries. The outcome of the vaccine on the subjects was evaluated against a different group of kids who had not been given shots (Meldrum, 1998). 

References

Meldrum, M. (1998). “A calculated risk”: the Salk polio vaccine field trials of 1954.  BMJ : British Medical Journal ,  317 (7167), 1233–1236. 

Michigan Center for Public Health. (2010). Clinical & Community Trial Study Designs Retrieved from https://practice.sph.umich.edu/micphp/epicentral/clinical.php