Epidemiology of Animal Infectious Diseases (online)

Infectious diseases are an important cause of disease burden in animals, as well as economic costs. First, you will focus on the quantification of transmission in animals. You will not only learn the basic theory of mathematical modelling of animal infectious diseases. This theory is put to practice to quantify transmission parameters from observational data as well as designing and analyzing transmission experiments. After that you will focus on outbreak investigation, risk assessment and animal disease monitoring.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• understand the basic concepts in infectious disease epidemiology: R0, epidemic growth rate, generation time, SIR-model, transmission coefficient and infectious period.
• analyze infectious disease data
• estimate R0, epidemic growth rate, infectious period from field (sero)prevalence data
• transmission experiments
• understand the basic concepts of infectious disease risk mapping
• know how to perform both qualitative and quantitative risk assessments
• design an animal health surveillance scheme

Our courses are aimed at clinical researchers, nurses, general practitioners, and other health professionals who want to improve their skills in epidemiology, statistics and (clinical) research.

6 weeks, 14 hours per week (online)

Exam: 5 June 2026, from 14:15 – 16:15 CET.
Re-examination: 24 July 2026
Exams are online using online proctoring.

Note: these times might be subject to change. The exact time and place will be announced as soon as possible in the learning environment and any changes announced there will overrule the information here.

The exam is not compulsory. However, if you want to receive the Course Certificate and the credits, it is obligatory to take the exam.

It might be that, due to a force majeure situation, you cannot be present during the first exam moment. Participants should contact the MSc Epidemiology through MSc-Epidemiology@umcutrecht.nl

Even though you can manage your own time our courses are not intended as individual education. We offer personalized online learning with lots of interaction with peer students, the E-moderator and lecturers. Flexibility from students, a positive attitude towards teachers and peers and the willingness to learn together and help each other is invaluable to our courses. To experience maximum interaction, we advise you to log on several times per week.

Note that the starting dates of courses, interim deadlines, and dates of exams are fixed, but you can choose when and where you want to watch web lectures and work on assignments. The e-moderator of the course will inform you about the beginning of the course and about deadlines during the course.

The average required study workload for the courses of MSc Epidemiology Postgraduate Online is 14 hours per week. You will need this time to study, to keep up with the assignments and course material.

Veterinary Epidemiology is broad concept therefore there were multiple online courses created. These courses can be ordered in a bundle. This bundle consists out of 3 online courses: Study Design in Veterinary Epidemiology, Epidemiology of Animal Infectious Diseases and Hands-on Veterinary Epidemiology.

The bundle offers 20% discount, read more about it here.

To enroll in this course, you need:

• Completed the course Modern methods in Data Analysis and/or Generalized Linear Models (or equivalent course)
• Basic skill in R (or in another computer language such as Python or C++)
• Sufficient proficiency in English reading and writing

For this course, the following book is used: ‘Veterinary Epidemiology: An Introduction’ by Dirk Pfeiffer, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-4051-7694-1. The book by Dirk Pfeiffer is also available as a PDF file for participants in this course.

For further and more in-depth reading, we recommend: ‘Modeling Infectious Diseases in Humans and Animals’ by Matt Keeling & Pejman Rohani (2007) – ISBN 978-0-691116-17-4

Please note that this course is part of an existing program within the Graduate School of Life Sciences. Tuitition fees may alter during the year.