2,500 students ... but you find out during your initial screen that 500 already have the disease. So, strikeout those people. That leaves 2,000 students who don’t have the disease.

Over the course of 1 year, you discover 200 students developed the infection. Thus:

200 new cases / 2,000 people who didn’t have the disease when you started your study = 10 percent

Tricky, tricky NBME ...

Don’t forget that incidence is the number of new cases which emerge in an unaffected population. Incidence is trying to get at the question -> “In a given year, how many new people develop this disease?”

In other words, you cannot count people who already have the disease. You have to exclude those people from your calculation. You want to know, among all the people out there who DO NOT have the disease, how many times this year was someone (newly) diagnosed?

Said differently still, you don’t want to “double-count” people who developed the disease before your study. As an epidemiologist, that would screw up your sense of how infective or transmissible a disease is. You want to know, “from time₁ to time₂ how many new cases emerged?”

Ok I get that if 500 already have the disease then the risk pool is dropped to 2000 students but the question specifically says that the test is done a year later...if 500 people had chlamydia, you would treat them. You don't become immune to chlamydia after infection so they would go back into the risk pool, meaning the pool would return to 2500. The answer should be 8%, this was a bad question.

Also consider this great description from the NIH’s MeSH database:

INCIDENCE: The number of new cases of a given disease during a given period in a specified population. It also is used for the rate at which new events occur in a defined population. It is differentiated from PREVALENCE, which refers to all cases, new or old, in the population at a given time.

https://meshb.nlm.nih.gov/record/ui?ui=D015994

guys!!

the question doesnt say that the 500 got cured, so it will be 2000 who are at risk.