Seventeen years of intervention epidemiology training at Veyrier-du-Lac, 1984-2000

Early in the 1980s, those involved in public health held symposiums to assess the training of epidemiologists in France showed inadequacies in the teaching of field epidemiology. Hitherto epidemiology in France had been largely confined to research. Evolution of public health practice, with an increasing demand to base decisions on epidemiological data, made it necessary to develop a network of intervention epidemiologists trained to work with standardised methods.