Morbidity

In medicine and epidemiology, the term morbidity can refer to

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• the state of being diseased (from Latin morbidus: sick, unhealthy),
• the degree or severity of a disease,
• the prevalence of a disease: the total number of cases in a particular population at a particular point in time,
• the incidence of a disease: the number of new cases in a particular population during a particular time interval.

Accordingly, the term morbidity rate can refer either to the incidence rate or to the prevalence rate of a disease. Compare with mortality rate, the number of people dying from a particular disease during a given time interval, divided by the total number of people in the population.

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Medicine: Medicine is a branch of health science concerned with maintaining human health and restoring it by treating disease and injury; it is both an area of knowledge, a science of body systems and diseases and their treatment, and the applied practice of that knowledge....

Epidemiology: Epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of disease in human populations (Rothman and Greenland), and the application of this study to control of health problems (Last 2001)....