In most all other kinds of illness and injury-prevention research, federal funds help create large multisource databases of what is called morbidity and mortality, or illness, injury, and death, from which researchers can then track trends over time. For instance, an influenza researcher might access a large database to track how many people got sick from the flu over a ten-year period in a certain county and cross-check that with data that detailed how many people received the flu vaccine.
