Epidemiology Quotes

It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?

Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.

But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea.VIII Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump—also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night—may want to take note.

Whether epidemiology alone can, in strict logic, ever prove causality, even in this modern sense, may be questioned, but the same must also be said of laboratory experiments on animals. —Richard Doll

To take care of cancer patients is an enormous privilege, but it also involves deploying everything in your toolbox: the emotional, the psychological, the scientific, the epidemiologic.

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted. There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.

Most people do not know what epidemiology is or how it contributes to the health of our society. This fact is somewhat paradoxical, given that epidemiology pervades oir lives.

Poison is a glyph for magical power itself: complex, concentrated, liberated in the hands of the elect, and disastrous in the hands of the fool. Its very nature is transmutative, changing all it touches, the maker and breaker of laws, policies, and epidemiological systems.

Your frequent claim that we must understand religious belief as a “social construct,” produced by “societal causes,” dependent upon “social and cultural institutions,” admitting of “sociological questions,” and the like, while it will warm the hearts of most anthropologists, is either trivially true or obscurantist. It is part and parcel of the double standard that so worries me—the demolition of which is the explicit aim of The Reason Project. Epidemiology is also a “social construct” with “societal causes,” etc.—but this doesn’t mean that the germ theory of disease isn’t true or that any rival “construct”—like one suggesting that child rape will cure AIDS—isn’t a dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity. We either have good reasons or bad reasons for what we believe; we can be open to evidence and argument, or we can be closed; we can tolerate (and even seek) criticism of our most cherished views, or we can hide behind authority, sanctity, and dogma. The main reason why children are still raised to think that the universe is 6,000 years old is not because religion as a “social institution” hasn’t been appropriately coddled and cajoled, but because polite people (and scientists terrified of losing their funding) haven’t laughed this belief off the face of the earth. We did not lose a decade of progress on stem-cell research in the United States because of religion as a “social construct”; we lost it because of the behavioural and emotional consequences of a specific belief. If there were a line in the book of Genesis that read – “The soul enters the womb on the hundredth day (you idiots)” – we wouldn’t have lost a step on stem-cell research, and there would not be a Christian or Jew anywhere who would worry about souls in Petri dishes suffering the torments of the damned. The beliefs currently rattling around in the heads of human beings are some of the most potent forces on earth; some of the craziest and most divisive of these are “religious,” and so-dubbed they are treated with absurd deference, even in the halls of science; this is a very bad combination—that is my point.

In the post-Covid world, the mathematics of chaos theory will experience a greater relevancy as it is applied across a broader set of science disciplines, especially epidemiology, precision medicine and climate science. - Tom Golway

In this, the largest epidemiological study ever conducted, the highest life expectancy is among individuals who are overweight by our current standards and the lowest life expectancy is among those defined as underweight. What’s more, individuals who fit into what is deemed the ideal weight range had a lower life expectancy than some of those who were obese.)

Changing mainstream media will be hard, but you can help create parallel options. More academics should blog, post videos, post audio, post lectures, offer articles, and more. You’ll enjoy it: I’ve had threats and blackmail, abuse, smears and formal complaints with forged documentation. But it’s worth it, for one simple reason: pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science works.

The accelerating pace of zoonotic transmission of novel viruses into humans is attributable to anthropogenic epidemiologic factors. Only behavior modification or medical management of this future health burden will minimize the risks of future zoonoses for human populations.

The important thing is that, thanks to epidemiological studies, we know that exercise is the most powerful anti-aging tactic we’ve got.

One thing is clear,” they continued about the two recently published epidemiological studies, “statistical association must not be immediately equated with cause and effect.

Epidemiology is in fact a mathematical subject,’ he wrote in 1911, ‘and fewer absurd mistakes would be made regarding it (for example, those regarding malaria) if more attention were given to the mathematical study of it.’[28]

The principle of critical mass is so simple that it is no wonder that it shows up in epidemiology, fashion, survival and extinction of species, language systems, racial integration, jaywalking, panic behavior, and political movements.

That’s because I believe in what I call consequential epidemiology. That is, by attempting to change what could happen if we don’t act, we can positively alter the course of history, rather than merely record and explain it retrospectively.

These epidemiological and experimental studies have provided evidence for a dietary pattern that is associated with reduced risk of developing cancer, atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and type II diabetes.

NBC News "Lead from gasoline blunted the IQ of about half the U.S. population, study says" by Elizabeth Chuck …on a population basis, shifting the average IQ down even a small amount could have large consequences, said Sung Kyun Park, an associate professor of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. The entire bell curve shifts, he explained, with more of the population at what was once the extreme low end of IQ scores.

Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is a striking case in point. Its network of sample hospitals allowed it to first “discover”—in the epidemiological sense—such hitherto unknown diseases as toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaire’s disease, and AIDS.

In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend. He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’.

...because she remembered saying It seems like it's been fairly well contained, but here's an epidemiological question: if you're talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn't fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? ... A virus is either contained or it isn't. It's a binary condition.

A number of prominent epidemiological studies have reported that nighttime shift work, and the disruption to circadian rhythms and sleep that it causes, up your odds of developing numerous different forms of cancer considerably. To date, these include associations with cancer of the breast, cancer of the prostate, cancer of the uterus wall or the endometrium, and cancer of the colon.

To comprehend the interactions between Homo sapiens and the vast and diverse microbial world, perspectives must be forged that meld such disparate fields as medicine, environmentalism, public health, basic ecology, primate biology, human behavior, economic development, cultural anthropology, human rights law, entomology, parasitology, virology, bacteriology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology.

Gilligan makes it very clear what the most powerful generator of shame and humiliation is in human culture, according to his extensive study. As corroborated by others in epidemiological research, socioeconomic inequality appears to be the greatest driver of behavioral violence in general. Gilligan states, “Worldwide, the most powerful predictor of the murder rate is the size of the gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor. The most powerful predictor of the rate of national or collective violence—war, civil insurrection, and terrorism—is the size of the gap between income and wealth between the rich and poor nations.”46 This is a troubling finding as wealth inequity is a textbook characteristic of capitalism, effectively making capitalism itself a precondition for war and violence.

How do you know?" Red repeated each word slowly, enunciating every consonant. "If the CDC brewed up something in their lab and it accidentally was let loose in the world, do you think they would tell you?

Many women, worried about breast cancer, have adopted vegetarian diets in an attempt to reduce their risk. Unfortunately, it may be that these grain- and starch-based diets actually increase the risk of breast cancer, because they elevate insulin—which, in turn, increases IGF-1 and lowers IGFBP-3. A large epidemiological study of Italian women, led by Dr. Silvia Franceschi, has shown that eating large amounts of pasta and refined bread raises the risk of developing both breast and colorectal cancer. Most vegetarian diets are based on starchy grains and legumes. Sadly—despite continuing perceptions of these as healthy foods—vegetarian diets don’t reduce the risk of cancer. In the largest-ever study comparing the causes of death in more than 76,000 people, it was decisively shown that there were no differences in death rates from breast, prostate, colorectal, stomach, or lung cancer between vegetarians and meat eaters. Cancer is a complex process involving many genetic and environmental factors. It is almost certain that no single dietary element is responsible for all cancers. However, with the low-glycemic Paleo Diet, which is also high in lean protein and health-promoting fruits and vegetables, your risk of developing many types of cancer may be very much reduced.

[...] I’m very grateful to all the many companies and people who, by their optimistically bad behaviour under fire, have given narrative colour to what might otherwise have been some very dry explanations of basic statistical principles.

A recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed 123,216 subjects over fourteen years and found that men who spent more than 6 hours a day sitting were 17 percent more likely to die during that time than men who sat for less than 3 hours. For women, the increased risk of death was 34 percent. This increased mortality persisted regardless of whether the participants smoked, were overweight, and—this shocked me—regardless of how much they exercised. Humans aren’t built to sit all day.

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal. It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.

By the end of 1986, the Liquidators had decontaminated more than 600 villages and towns. Army troops travelling in armoured vehicles washed Kiev’s buildings continually throughout May and June, and it became a crime to own a personal dosimeter in the city for more than two years after the accident. The government placed strict controls on the sale of fresh food; open-air stalls were banned. These restrictions lead the Head of the Central Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of the Ukraine to remark that, “thousands of ice cream, cake and soft drink stalls have vanished from the streets of Kiev.228

increases of the infectivity rate may lead to large epidemics.” This quiet warning has echoed loudly ever since. It’s a cardinal truth, over which public health officials obsess each year during influenza season. Another implication was that epidemics don’t end because all the susceptible individuals are either dead or recovered. They end because susceptible individuals are no longer sufficiently dense within the population. W. H. Hamer had said so in 1906, remember? Ross had made the same point in 1916. But the paper by Kermack and McKendrick turned it into a working principle of mathematical epidemiology.

Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7.

For some reason there is a tendency to assume that one wild animal is a suitable model for another related species, whereas similar evidence would not be acceptable in human or veterinary medicine. For example, Shulaw etal. (1986) developed a serologic test to detect antibodies to Mycobacterium aviumssp. paratuberculosisin white-tailed deer, but determined the validity of the test “in deer” by using samples from infected sika and fallow deer. It is doubtful that a test developed to detect disease in humans would be accepted for use in public health circles, if its validity had been established by using squirrel monkeys and baboons!

The power of a study typically should be set at 80% or greater, so if there is truly a difference in treatments, the chances are 80% or greater that your research project will identify this fact. Power = 1 - beta. Beta is the probability of making a Type II error (accepting the null hypothesis when in fact it is incorrect).

Peter Navarro never hid his antagonism toward me. He stopped me one day in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where we were tested routinely for COVID, and again blasted my failure to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine, the lack of which he said was causing people to die. He would not let it go. Perhaps he just had a thing about me. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I arranged with Cliff Lane to have Navarro present via Zoom his case on hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness to the entire NIH guidelines panel cochaired by Cliff in early August. This group was thirty-five of the top experts in infectious disease, public health, and epidemiology from all over the country. Navarro made his presentation, and uniformly they politely said, “Mr. Navarro, there’s nothing there. These are anecdotes, and all the evidence indicates hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work and can even cause harm.” Navarro’s answer was that he valued his reading of the existing medical literature on hydroxychloroquine as much as or more than theirs. “If I am wrong, no one is harmed. If you are wrong, thousands of people die.” The truth was the exact opposite. By that time, the FDA, which had given hydroxychloroquine emergency approval early in the pandemic, had revoked it on June 15, after it was found to cause heart problems and even death, not to mention proving ineffective against COVID. I had given Navarro one last chance, but he still could not accept reality.

Let’s start with “leaner.” Legions of Atkins and Paleo dieters—as well as obesity experts—fiercely contest the superiority of a plant-based diet for making you “leaner.” Like all nutrition science, the science of weight loss is complicated and uncertain. The relative effectiveness of moderate exercise, long thought a key component in reducing obesity rates, is now under scrutiny. (A recent editorial in the International Journal of Epidemiology is titled “Physical activity does not influence obesity risk: time to clarify the public health message.”) Even the wisdom of gradual weight loss is questionable, in light of a new study that suggests crash dieters don’t gain back weight any more than dieters who drop pounds gradually.

Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.

Roughly 25 percent of humanity is Muslim. For every Jew, there are roughly one hundred twenty-five Muslims. Judaism is about 2500 years older than Islam, and yet it has not been able to attract nearly as many followers. If we construe religions as memeplexes (a collection of interconnected memes), to borrow Richard Dawkin's term, the Islamic memeplex has been extraordinarily more successful than its Jewish counterpart (from an epidemiological perspective, that is). Why is that? To answer this important question, we must look at the contents of the two respective memeplexes to examine why one is more "infectious" than the other. Let us explore the rules for converting into the two religions and apostatizing out of them. In Judaism, the religious process for conversion is onerous, requiring several years of commitment and an absence of ulterior motive. (For example, converting to Judaism because you are marrying a Jewish person is considered an ulterior motive). Not surprisingly, given the barriers to entry, relatively few people convert to Judaism. On the other hand, to convert to Islam simply requires that one proclaim openly the sentence, the shahada (the testimony): "There is no true god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." It does not require a sophisticated epidemiological model to predict which memeplex will spread more rapidly. Let us now suppose that one wishes to leave the religion. While the Old Testament does mention the death penalty for apostasy, it has seldom been applied throughout Jewish history, whereas to this day apostasy from Islam does lead to the death penalty in several Islamic countries. But perhaps the most important difference is that Judaism does not promote or encourage proselytizing, whereas it is a central religious obligation in Islam. According to Islam, the world is divided into dar al-hard (the house of war) and dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). Peace will arrive when the entire world is united under the flag of Allah. Hence, it is imperative to Islamize the nations within dar al-harb. There is only one Jewish country in the world, Israel, and it has a sizeable non-Jewish minority. But there are fifty-seven member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

In April, Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, M.D., an upstate New York physician and early HCQ adopter, reproduced Dr. Didier Raoult’s “startling successes” by dramatically reducing expected mortalities among 800 patients Zelenko treated with the HCQ cocktail.29 By late April of 2020, US doctors were widely prescribing HCQ to patients and family members, reporting outstanding results, and taking it themselves prophylactically. In May 2020, Dr. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. published the most comprehensive study, to date, on HCQ’s efficacy against COVID. Risch is Yale University’s super-eminent Professor of Epidemiology, an illustrious world authority on the analysis of aggregate clinical data. Dr. Risch concluded that evidence is unequivocal for early and safe use of the HCQ cocktail. Dr. Risch published his work—a meta-analysis reviewing five outpatient studies—in affiliation with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the American Journal of Epidemiology, under the urgent title, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to Pandemic Crisis.”30 He further demonstrated, with specificity, how HCQ’s critics—largely funded by Bill Gates and Dr. Tony Fauci31—had misinterpreted, misstated, and misreported negative results by employing faulty protocols, most of which showed HCQ efficacy administered without zinc and Zithromax which were known to be helpful. But their main trick for ensuring the protocols failed was to wait until late in the disease process before administering HCQ—when it is known to be ineffective. Dr. Risch noted that evidence against HCQ used late in the course of the disease is irrelevant. While acknowledging that Dr. Didier Raoult’s powerful French studies favoring HCQ efficacy were not randomized, Risch argued that the results were, nevertheless, so stunning as to far outweigh that deficit: “The first study of HCQ + AZ [ . . . ] showed a 50-fold benefit of HCQ + AZ vs. standard of care . . . This is such an enormous difference that it cannot be ignored despite lack of randomization.”32 Risch has pointed out that the supposed need for randomized placebo-controlled trials is a shibboleth. In 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration proved in a landmark meta-analysis of 10,000 studies, that observational studies of the kind produced by Didier Raoult are equal

way stress impedes healing.49 Kiecolt-Glaser and colleagues have also examined how stress affects aging—at the cellular level. At the ends of each of our forty-six chromosomes, which house our DNA, are structures called telomeres. As we age, the telomeres become shorter and shorter. Once they become too short, mistakes start creeping into the way our DNA replicates, which is the leading edge of the aging process. Kiecolt-Glaser points out that there is “ample epidemiological data that stressed caregivers die sooner than people not in that role.” So she and her team compared various elements of the immune response as seen in the blood, as well as telomere lengths in circulating blood cells, in forty-one caregivers and forty-one matched controls.50 As you might suspect, not only was immune function off in the caregivers, but their telomeres were shorter. This shows that stress can age people at the very level of their cells, thereby potentially shaving years off their lives.

Public health was and is where the largest numbers of lives are saved, usually by understanding the epidemiology of a disease—its patterns, where and how it emerges and spreads—and attacking it at its weak points. This usually means prevention. Science had first contained smallpox, then cholera, then typhoid, then plague, then yellow fever, all through large-scale public health measures, everything from filtering water to testing and killing rats to vaccination. Public health measures lack the drama of pulling someone back from the edge of death, but they save lives by the millions.

... When infectious diseases lost their hold as the major causes of death, the industrialised world underwent a shift, known as the 'epidemiological transition' and chronic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, replaced infections as the major causes of death and poor health.

In other cases, the reasons for forgetting are more prosaic, more epidemiological, more related to numbers: the particular pandemic disease was not fatal enough (2009 H1N1 influenza), or it did not afflict enough people because it was not infectious enough (MERS), or it burned out too fast (SARS-1), or it afflicted a confined subgroup of the human population (Ebola), or it was brought low by a vaccine (measles and polio), or by treatment (HIV), or by eradication (smallpox), allowing most people to simply push the disease out of their minds. While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

In most cases, the infection is asymptomatic and the patient is unaware of its presence. It is critical to the epidemiology of polio, however, that such people nevertheless shed the virus and function as asymptomatic carriers.

Snow published his findings and the maps that illustrated them in his major work of 1855 On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, which is now widely considered the foundational text of epidemiology as a discipline. During Snow’s lifetime, although the book kept the emerging germ theory in public view, it failed to persuade the medical profession. Anticontagionism and miasmatism persisted as orthodoxy with regard to cholera.

Etiology, epidemiology, nosology, and preventive public health would have no basis in reality. Pasteur began to develop an alternative theory during the 1850s. At that time he devoted his attention to two major and related problems of French agriculture: the spoilage of wine transformed by acetic acid fermentation into vinegar, and the spoilage of milk by lactic acid fermentation. This spoilage was universally considered to be a chemical process. Pasteur demonstrated instead that it was due to the action of living microorganisms—bacteria that he identified through the microscope and learned to cultivate in his laboratory.

First, they needed to understand the epidemiology of influenza, how it behaved and spread. Scientists had already learned to control cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, malaria, bubonic plague, and other diseases by understanding their epidemiology even before developing either a vaccine or cure. Second, they needed to learn its pathology, what it did within the body, the precise course of the disease. That too might allow them to intervene in some way that saved lives. Third, they needed to know what the pathogen was, what microorganism caused influenza. This could allow them to find a way to stimulate the immune system to prevent or cure the disease. It was also conceivable that even without knowing the precise cause, they could develop a serum or vaccine.

We cannot learn what causes violence and how we could prevent it as long as we are thinking in the traditional moral and legal terms. The only questions that this way of thinking can ask take the form: "How evil (or heroic) was this particular act of violence, and how much punishment (or reward) does the person who did it deserve?" But even if it were possible to gain the knowledge that would be necessary to answer those questions (which it is not), answers would still not help us in the least to understand what causes violence or how we could prevent it — these are empirical not moral questions. It is only by approaching violence from the point of view of empirical disciplines, as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, including social and preventive psychiatry and psychology, that we can acquire knowledge as to the causes and prevention of violence — by engaging in clinical, experimental, and epidemiological research on violent and non-violent behavior, the people who behave in those ways, and the circumstances under which they do so.

FDA used the same playbook in 2002 to isolate, silence, and drive from government service its star epidemiologist, Dr. Bart Classen, when his massive epidemiologic studies, the largest ever performed, linked Hib vaccines to the juvenile diabetes epidemic. FDA ordered Dr. Classen to refrain from publishing the government-funded studies, forbade him from talking publicly about the alarming outbreak, and eventually forced him out of government service.

Over the course of 2021/2022 we will see the current transformation initiatives and innovation around supply chains being applied to the science of #epidemiology to track the journey and morphing of infectious diseases. #COVID19 #PrecisionMedicine - Tom Golway

if spiritual forces operate in a different sphere to the rule of law and human rights, then democratic politics is failing to deal with a fundamental problem in people’s lives and after-lives. the repercussions of AIDS for the moral cosmology are profound indeed. the secular frameworks of epidemiology and public policy will not by themselves be enough to make sense of the virus and epidemic. we need to develop and deploy metaphors that speak to the social world, constructed around moral imaginings which are impacted by AIDS and which in turn constrain social capabilities to respond to AIDS. we should also be alert to the fact that scholars and policy makers themselves are unable to think about the crisis that is AIDS without using language and imagery borrowed from another realm of human experience. how we think about the AIDS epidemic becomes its own reality. yet we must not lose sight of the virus and the disease. (…) AIDS represents the ordinary workings of biology, not an irrational or diabolical plague with moral meaning. HIV transmission is preventable and medication is available that can extend a healthy life for those living with HIV. science can triumph, given resources, policies and the right social and political context.

BUSTER You may have heard the myth that higher-protein diets lead to kidney dysfunction. The data tell us otherwise. A meta-analysis conducted by prominent protein researcher Stu Philips looked at higher-protein (HP) diets (≥ 1.5 g/kg body weight or ≥ 20% energy intake or ≥ 100 g/day) and their effects on kidney function. The indicator known as glomerular filtration rate (GFR) reflects any change in the efficiency of kidney function. When compared with normal- or lower-protein (≥ 5% less energy intake from protein/day) diets, HP diet interventions did not significantly elevate GFR relative to diets containing lower amounts of protein. Researchers concluded that HP intake does not negatively influence renal function in healthy adults.2 A systematic review of randomized controlled trials and epidemiologic studies conducted by Van Elswyk et al. found that HP intake (≥ 20% but < 35% of energy or ≥ 10% higher than a comparison intake) had little to no effect on blood markers of kidney function (e.g., blood pressure) when compared with groups following US RDA recommendations (0.8 g/kg or 10–15% of energy).

Epidemiology is an ever evolving science since predictive models have significant sensitive dependencies on initial assumptions - Tom Golway

The New World was like a vast, tinder-dry forest waiting to burn—and Columbus brought the fire. That European diseases ran rampant in the New World is an old story, but recent discoveries in genetics, epidemiology, and archaeology have painted a picture of the die-off that is truly apocalyptic; the lived experience of the indigenous communities during this genocide exceeds the worst that any horror movie has imagined. It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world’s first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the “empire on which the sun never sets,” so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

In epidemiology, for example, it was well known that epidemics tend to come in cycles, regular or irregular. Measles, polio, rubella—all rise and fall in frequency. May realized that the oscillations could be reproduced by a nonlinear model and he wondered what would happen if such a system received a sudden kick—a perturbation of the kind that might correspond to a program of inoculation. Naïve intuition suggests that the system will change smoothly in the desired direction. But actually, May found, huge oscillations are likely to begin. Even if the long-term trend was turned solidly downward, the path to a new equilibrium would be interrupted by surprising peaks. In fact, in data from real programs, such as a campaign to wipe out rubella in Britain, doctors had seen oscillations just like those predicted by May’s model. Yet any health official, seeing a sharp short-term rise in rubella or gonorrhea, would assume that the inoculation program had failed.

In 1977 a psychologist and epidemiologist named Ernest M. Gruenberg at Johns Hopkins University called the rise of these immiserating diseases the “failures of success”: the more the health care system enabled people to survive to old age, the more they developed chronic diseases that sucked the quality out of life. Gruenberg argued that we should view health care as an epidemiological force, like a pathogen, which reduces rates of death but increases rates of sickness and disability. The system’s priorities were twisted, Gruenberg believed, because it was preoccupied with extending life, not health. So research dollars went to picking off the acute causes of death, which tend to work pretty quickly, rather than to delaying or preventing chronic diseases that drag on and on, bringing whole families into their circle of pain. To Gruenberg, this went against the oath to do no harm. If cancer patients typically die of pneumonia, say, and we develop treatments for pneumonia, all we’ve done for their cancer is ensure that they spend more years dying of it. In place of a day on their deathbed, we’ve given them a month and called it progress. “Instead of enhancing the people’s health this kind of deathly thinking has been increasing the people’s sickness and disability,” he wrote. “Now that we recognize that our life-saving technology of the past four decades has outstripped our health-preserving technology and that the net effect has been to worsen the people’s health, we must begin the search for preventable causes of the chronic illnesses which we have been extending.” Yes, medicine was helping us live longer, Gruenberg said, but the extra years were added at the end, when we were too weak or sick to enjoy them.

Carter invented a name for what they were doing. “Redneck epidemiology,” he called it.

Large-scale studies continued to emphasize these same findings. Two large prospective European studies, which included almost four thousand patients without prior cardiovascular disease, found a more than fivefold increase in mortality with a low sodium intake versus the highest sodium intake.127 The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study examined over 100,000 people in seventeen countries and found that the lowest risk of death or cardiovascular events was in those consuming between 3,000 and 6,000 milligrams of sodium per day.

Fauci, who at one point infamously proclaimed himself the embodiment of science, saying those who criticize him are “really criticizing science because I represent science,”45 like some oracle of epidemiology dispensing pandemic policy from atop Mount Parnassus.

Future generations of effective intelligence and law enforcement officers seeking to thwart the threats posed by tyrants, terrorists, and the technologies of mass destruction might be required to be as knowledgeable in the terminology of epidemiology as they are with the tradecraft of espionage." -- K. Lee Lerner. Cornwall, U.K. May, 2003.

Concerning intelligence, "the capability to identify what to carefully examine—often a decision driven by mathematical analysis—has become as essential as the capacity to gather the intelligence itself." -- K. Lee Lerner. Cornwall, U.K. May, 2003.

Quantifying excess deaths is a statistical technique often employed by modern scholars studying epidemics, but it was first proposed by a founder of epidemiology, William Farr, in London in 1847. Farr defined this quantity as the number of deaths observed during an epidemic in excess of those expected under normal circumstances.

The work of epidemiology is related to unanswered questions, but also to unquestioned answers.

The economist J.K. Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society (1958) about 'private affluence and public squalor', demonstrating the pernicious effects on the economy and society of excessive wealth inequality, and the paradox that the wealthy, though gaining from tax cuts and excessive pay, still lost out because the country as a whole was poorer. In 2009, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson applied an epidemiological approach to issues such as violence, obesity and anxiety to demonstrate how the more unequal a society is in terms of wealth and income, the more its social problems worsen for everyone, not only those living in deprivation. Their book The Spirit Level also explored the sociological processes behind these connections, centring on trust and anxiety - how we, as social animals, thrive when we have a secure place in society and a reasonable status.

Concerning intelligence, "the capability to identify what to carefully examine—often a decision driven by mathematical analysis—has become as essential as the capacity to gather the intelligence itself." K. Lee Lerner. Cornwall, U.K. May, 2003. intelligence, "the capability to identify what to carefully examine—often a decision driven by mathematical analysis—has become as essential as the capacity to gather the intelligence itself." -- K. Lee Lerner. Cornwall, U.K. May, 2003.

The Freudians, of course, assume that some variety of sexual misery is what causes addiction in the first place. Like most Freudian theories, this is undoubtedly oversimplified, since it ignores the fact that, epidemiologically, addiction is a disease of exposure, just like malaria (that is, if you are born in Harlem, you will more likely become a junkie than somebody born on Park Avenue). Nevertheless, sex and junk have some symbiotic relationship, if only because junk destroys physical sex and leaves the addicts with no eroticism except in their fantasy. This probably explains their sexual games with their needles.

Research also shows that a less stressful life doesn’t make people nearly as happy as they think it will. Although most people predict they would be happier if they were less busy, the opposite turns out to be true. People are happier when they are busier, even when forced to take on more than they would choose. A dramatic decrease in busyness may explain why retirement can increase the risk of developing depression by 40 percent. A lack of meaningful stress may even be bad for your health. In one large epidemiological study, middle-aged men who reported higher levels of boredom were more than twice as likely to die of a heart attack over the next twenty years. In contrast, many studies show that people who have a sense of purpose live longer. For example, in a study that followed over nine thousand adults in the U.K. for ten years, those who reported highly meaningful lives had a 30 percent reduction in mortality. This reduced risk held even after controlling for factors including education, wealth, depression, and health behaviors such as smoking, exercise, and drinking.

letting the A/C run, and using PanScan—one of several competing apps in the anonymized contact tracing space—to check his immunological status versus that of everyone currently in the house. Since Willem was the interloper, he was the most likely to be bringing new viral strains in to this household. Eventually the app produced a little map of the property, showing icons for everyone there, color-coded based on epidemiological risk. The upshot was that Willem could get by without a mask provided he kept his distance from Hendrik. Oh, and if he ventured upstairs he should put a mask on because there was a Kuok in the second bedroom on the left whose recent exposure history was almost as colorful as Willem’s. Accordingly he and his father sat two meters apart in a gazebo in the snatch of mowed lawn between the house and the bank where the property plunged into the bayou.

One of the more fascinating examples came when a reader sent me a 1973 paper from what at the time was the Journal of Hygiene (now known as Epidemiology and Infection). The paper reported on an outbreak of respiratory illness in 1969 at a British research base in Antarctica—in the middle of the Antarctic winter, after 17 weeks of complete isolation. Out of nowhere, six of the twelve researchers at the base had developed colds. Despite intensive study, the researchers never figured out how the illness had started or what pathogen was behind it. I linked to the piece on Twitter as an example of the absurdity of hoping that lockdowns could ever completely contain a respiratory virus.12

It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes a group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis, to be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that the critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken.2,3

The insight is, in a sense, an epidemiological one: most often, diseases themselves make a preferential option for the poor. Every careful survey, across boundaries of time and space, shows us that the poor are sicker than the nonpoor. They're at increased risk of dying prematurely, whether from increased exposure to pathogens (including pathogenic situations) or from decreased access to services-or, as is most often the case, from both of these "risk factors" working together.2 Given this indisputable association, medicine has a clear-if not always observed-mandate to devote itself to populations struggling against poverty.

anthropology and epidemiology have much more in common than their current self-presentation may allow us to believe.

anthropologists are currently being cast as facilitators in the rapid production and uptake of knowledge, the fast-tracking of community outreach, and the real-time integration of behavioural and epidemiological insights (Abramowitz et al. 2018).

envisioning what a critical epidemiology may be, what could be its aims, programme, and principles.

Dr. Sundari Mase, offers extensive experience as Team Lead for CDC's Travel Epidemiology and Risk Mitigation Team in the Division of Global Migration Health. With a background in neurobiology and internal medicine, she previously served as a Teaching Assistant and worked with disabled children before transitioning to public health. Her significant contributions have garnered recognition, including honors like the North Bay Women in Business Award and the Global Citizen Award.

Lung disease gets 5.3 percent of us. Fitter people have lungs that are 2.8 times less at risk of disease, say scientists at Northwestern University. The recent pandemic Covid-19 attacked the lungs and could cause pneumonia and, in turn, death. A study in Annals of Epidemiology found that fitter people face a smaller risk of developing pneumonia compared to the unfit. And the CDC found that people infected with Covid-19 who also suffered from preventable lifestyle diseases driven by a lack of fitness were six times more likely to be hospitalized.

Epidemiological studies have established that people who sleep less are the same individuals who are more likely to be overweight or obese.

Beyond suicides, men are much more likely than women to be the victims of a murder, to be incarcerated, and to be homeless;27 one wonders why the patriarchy has yet to resolve those disparities in men’s favor. I am sure that the Wellesley College Women’s Studies department is assiduously working on explaining how these epidemiological facts make women the primary victims in all of these situations

In spite of the weakness of the epidemiological evidence linking nitrites to cancer, and the established fact that 95 per cent of all the nitrite we ingest comes from bacterial conversion of nitrates naturally found in vegetables, many consumers have a lingering concern about eating nitrite-cured processed meats. But one person’s concern is another’s business opportunity.

work and a minority that is too ill to work. The latter

Krauss and his colleagues concluded that “saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk” for heart disease or stroke. This was the first time a researcher had analyzed all the epidemiological studies together, and Krauss found that they amounted to an absence of incriminating evidence.

The inattention to disability within this topic area can be traced to a view dominated by the medical model in which disability is seen as a condition inherent in the individual.

Public health historically has used a linear model focusing exclusively on the body functions or dysfunctions of the person and that assumes the person's body dysfunctions and activity limitations are totally responsible for the individual's lack of involvement in the society

Traditionally, because disability has been seen as a problem or an outcome, less attention has been paid to the lives of individuals with impairments or disabilities

Brown (2001) summarizes, the domain of disability has shifted from the old paradigm wherein disability was a medical "problem" involving accessibility, accommodations, and equity to a new paradigm that emphasizes disability as a socio-environmental issue.

For many persons with disabilities, public attitudes, emotions, stigma, stereotypes, lack of access to rehabilitation, and occupational barriers are more limiting than the physical impairment.

Women with disabilities outnumber males in every race and ethnic group except Native Americans in which the gender rates are nearly equal (fans & Stoddard).

As compared to White-Americans, a larger percentage of African-American applicants to the vocational rehabilitation system are denied acceptance. Of the applicants accepted for service, a larger percentage of African-American cases are closed without being rehabilitated.

Epidemiologic studies indicate an inverse association between frequency of nut and seed consumption and body mass index. Interestingly, their consumption may actually suppress appetite and help people get rid of diabetes and lose weight.38 In other words, populations consuming more nuts and seeds are likely to be slim, and people consuming less seeds and nuts are more likely to be heavier. Well-controlled

Epidemiologic studies have linked osteoporosis not to low calcium intake but to various nutritional factors that cause excessive calcium loss in the urine. The

Two hormones, leptin and ghrelin, are secreted in a natural biorhythm. When the stomach is empty, its cells secrete ghrelin, sending a message to the brain that you register as feeling hungry. When you’ve had enough to eat, that’s the result of a message from leptin, secreted by fat cells, which balances the hunger-satiation rhythm. In fact, obesity and leptin have both been implicated in risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Epidemiological (i.e., population) studies have shown higher circulating leptin levels to be associated with lower risk of Alzheimer’s, while lower circulating levels of leptin have been found in patients already suffering from the disease. Leptin receptors are highly expressed in the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for short-term memory, which is ravaged by Alzheimer’s. Leptin supplementation actually led to less Alzheimer’s pathology in this brain region in mouse studies of the disease. This is yet further evidence strengthening the link between the gut and the brain.

we must absolutely deepen our understanding of male development—and alter the limited paradigms we use—right away. To keep saying that “masculinity” causes violence is to specifically not study epidemiological and toxicological causation for violence, and thus, perpetuate a cycle of violence and distress into the next generation.

That European diseases ran rampant in the New World is an old story, but recent discoveries in genetics, epidemiology, and archaeology have painted a picture of the die-off that is truly apocalyptic; the lived experience of the indigenous communities during this genocide exceeds the worst that any horror movie has imagined.

As a single case from half a century ago, Sybil Exposed cannot tell us anything about the reliability, validity, etiology, epidemiology, or typical treatment outcome of a mental disorder. Nathan’s alternative theory of pernicious anemia is implausible and supported by no corroborating evidence; Debbie Nathan advocates a hypothetical explanation of Shirley’s pre-1945 symptoms that is less evidence based than the trauma dissociation theory she rejects.

Years ago, before the advent of modern food manufacturing, most available foods were nutritious, farm-grown or farm-raised foods that sent messages to our weight regulation system. Our body read those signals, driving us to get calories in proportion to our needs. However, modern food processing has changed that. Today, the cheap calories found in the saturated fats, trans fats, and high-glycemic carbohydrates common in today’s “industrial diet” don’t register as strongly in our weight regulation system and don’t turn off our hunger drive, thus pushing many of us to eat more despite getting sufficient calories. It is not surprising that much epidemiologic research shows a strong relationship between consumption of low-cost, processed foods and weight.231

The sum of the evidence against saturated fat over the past half-century amounts to this: the early trials condemning saturated fat were unsound; the epidemiological data showed no negative association; saturated fat’s effect on LDL-cholesterol (when properly measured in subfractions) is neutral; and a significant body of clinical trials over the past decade has demonstrated the absence of any negative effect of saturated fat on heart disease, obesity, or diabetes.

The disaster also has a social etiology, which no meteorological study, medical autopsy, or epidemiological report can uncover. The human dimensions of the catastrophe remain unexplored. This book is organized around a social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Just as the medical autopsy opens the body to determine the proximate physiological causes of mortality, this inquiry aims to examine the social organs of the city and identify the conditions that contributed to the deaths of so many Chicago residents that July. If the idea of conducting a social autopsy sounds peculiar, this is largely because modern political and medical institutions have attained monopolistic roles in officially explaining, defining, and classifying life and death, in establishing the terms and categories that structure the way we see and do not see the world.

belief was widespread that electromagnetic fields from power lines and household appliances like microwave ovens were linked to childhood leukemia and other cancers. But there was little or no evidence of this in broad epidemiological studies.

A common feature of epidemiological data is that they are almost certain to be biased, of doubtful quality, or incomplete (and sometimes all three),” explained the epidemiologist John Bailar

Cardiovascular Morbidity and Obstructive Sleep Apnea Robert C. Basner, M.D. | 1405 words Volume 370:2339-2341 Number 24 June 12, 2014 Obstructive sleep apnea, a relatively common disorder in adults, is characterized by sleep-related periodic breathing, upper-airway obstruction and asphyxia, sleep disruption, and acute autonomic, arterial, and hemodynamic perturbations. Epidemiologic data show a strong association between untreated obstructive sleep apnea and incident cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. 1, 2 It is implicit that obstructive sleep apnea causes or propagates adverse cardiovascular outcomes and that its treatment may have a mitigating effect, and there are numerous instances in which explicit data have documented the efficacy of the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea in preventing or attenuating such outcomes. However, obstructive sleep apnea is typically identified along with cardiovascular, metabolic, and inflammatory disorders, and this “complicit” association confounds interpretation of the implicit and explicit associations between the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea and cardiovascular risk and outcomes.

Retrospective epidemiological studies report that 20% of the general population qualifies for a current psychiatric diagnosis and 50% for a lifetime one.4 Prospective epidemiological studies double these rates and suggest that mental disorder is becoming virtually ubiquitous.5, 6 During the past

western notions of medicine were based largely on superstition and exorcism in contrast to the Arab’s advanced clinical training and understanding of surgery, pharmacology and epidemiology. Westerners had no knowledge of ‘hygiene’ and sanitation’.

A 2009 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology called “Life-Course Socioeconomic Position and Incidence of Coronary Heart Disease” found that the longer a person remains in poverty, the more likely he or she is to develop heart disease.133 People who were economically disadvantaged throughout life were more likely to smoke, be obese, and have poor diets and the like. In an earlier study by epidemiologist Dr. Ralph R. Frerichs, focusing specifically on the socioeconomic divide in the city of Los Angeles, CA, found that the death rate from heart disease was 40 percent higher for poor men over all than for wealthier ones.134

According to recent epidemiological data, the “lifetime incidence” of anxiety disorder is more than 25 percent—which, if true, means that one in four of us can expect to be stricken by debilitating anxiety at some point in our lifetimes. And it is debilitating: Recent academic papers have argued that the psychic and physical impairment tied to living with an anxiety disorder is equivalent to living with diabetes—usually manageable, sometimes fatal, and always a pain to deal with.

Epidemiologic theory. As a phrase, it sounds at once dry and arcane.Yet, in reality, it is vital and engaging. Epidemiologic theory is about explaining the people’s health. It is about life and death. It is about biology and society. It is about ecology and the economy. It is about how the myriad activities and meanings of people’s lives—involving work, dignity, desire, love, play, confl ict, discrimination, and injustice—become literally incorporated into our bodies—that is, embodied—and manifest in our health status, individually and collectively. It is about why rates of disease and death change over time and vary geographically. It is about why different societies—and within societies, why different societal groups—have better or worse health than others. And it is about essential knowledge critical for improving the people’s health and minimizing inequitable burdens of disease, disability, and death

To be sure, the early days of the Industrial Revolution were rough going, but within a few generations, innovations in technology, medicine, government, and public health led to effective solutions for many of the mismatch diseases caused by the Agricultural Revolution, especially the burden of infectious disease from living at higher population densities with animals and in unsanitary conditions. Not all of these advances, however, are available to people unfortunate enough to live in poverty, especially in less developed nations. In addition, the progress made over the last 150 years has also come with some consequential drawbacks for people’s health. Most essentially, there has been an epidemiological transition. As fewer people succumb to diseases from malnutrition and infections, especially when they are young, more people are developing other kinds of noncommunicable diseases as they age. This transition is still ongoing: in the forty years between 1970 and 2010, the percentage of deaths worldwide from infectious disease and malnutrition fell by 17 percent and life expectancy increased by eleven years, while the percentage of deaths from noncommunicable diseases rose by 30 percent.61 As more people live longer, more of them are suffering from disability. In technical terms, lower rates of mortality have been accompanied by higher rates of morbidity (defined as a state of ill health from any form of disease).

Several principles are illustrated by this experience. The value of a program intended to reduce injuries is not necessarily a function of the good intentions of the program's proponents. Skill or behavior change programs can have unintended harmful effects and those effects are often found only by well-designed research. This is particularly true of programs that have the potential to increase exposure to hazards. Once a program becomes institutionalized, it is difficult to remove it no matter how ineffective or harmful its consequences.    A major barrier to the scientific evaluation of programs is the reluctance of those who develop, advocate or profit from programs to have them evaluated objectively. In some cases, their investment in the programs is only psychological, but in others it is economic.

Here are just two stand-out facts from a major study in the Annals of Epidemiology entitled ‘Vitamin D for Cancer Prevention.’[3] “Women with higher solar UVB exposure had only half the incidence of breast cancer as those with lower solar exposure.” “Men with higher residential solar exposure had only half the incidence rate of fatal prostate cancer.” To put that in simple English, if you spend longer in the sun, you may be far less likely to die of breast and prostate cancer (and lots of other cancers as well, but more on cancer later). But what about the increased risk of dying of skin cancer! I hear you cry. Well, what of it? Around 2,000 people a year die of malignant melanoma in the UK each year. If increased sun exposure were to double this figure, we would have 2,000 more cases. On the other hand, breast cancer kills around 20,000 a year, as does prostate cancer. If we managed to halve the rate of breast and prostate cancer, we would reduce cancer deaths by 20,000 a year. Which is ten times as great any potential increase in deaths from malignant melanoma.

Clinical descriptions and Epidemiology

Clinical descriptions and Epidemiology l There are two broad types of mood disorders: depressive disorders and bipolar disorders. l Depressive disorders include major depression and persistent depressive disorder, along with the newer diagnoses of premenstrual dysphoric disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. Bipolar disorders include bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder, and cyclothymia. l Bipolar I disorder is defined by mania. Bipolar II disorder is defined by hypomania and episodes of depression. Major depressive disorder, bipolar I disorder, and bipolar II disorder are episodic. Recurrence is very common in these disorders. l Persistent depressive disorder and cyclothymia are characterized by low levels of symptoms that last for at least 2 years. l Major depression is one of the most common psychiatric disorders, affecting 16.2 percent of people during their lifetime. Rates of depression are twice as high in women as in men. Bipolar I disorder is much rarer, affecting 1 percent or less of the population.

Subspecialty : Botany Studies : plants Subspecialty : Zoology Studies : animals Subspecialty : Marine biology Studies : organisms living in and around oceans, and seas Subspecialty : Fresh water biology Studies : organisms living in and around freshwater lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, etc. Subspecialty : Microbiology Studies : microorganisms Subspecialty : Bacteriology Studies : bacteria Subspecialty : Virology Studies : viruses ( see Figure below ) Subspecialty : Entomology Studies : insects Subspecialty : Taxonomy Studies : the classification of organisms Subspecialty : Studies : Life Science : Cell biology What it Examines : cells and their structures (see Figure below ) Life Science : Anatomy What it Examines : the structures of animals Life Science : Morphology What it Examines : the form and structure of living organisms Life Science : Physiology What it Examines : the physical and chemical functions of tissues and organs Life Science : Immunology What it Examines : the mechanisms inside organisms that protect them from disease and infection Life Science : Neuroscience What it Examines : the nervous system Life Science : Developmental biology and embryology What it Examines : the growth and development of plants and animals Life Science : Genetics What it Examines : the genetic make up of all living organisms (heredity) Life Science : Biochemistry What it Examines : the chemistry of living organisms Life Science : Molecular biology What it Examines : biology at the molecular level Life Science : Epidemiology What it Examines : how diseases arise and spread Life Science : What it Examines : Life Science : Ecology What it Examines : how various organisms interact with their environments Life Science : Biogeography What it Examines : the distribution of living organisms (see Figure below ) Life Science : Population biology What it Examines : the biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology of populations of organisms Life Science : What it Examines :

Oh, and if you’re afraid that the cholesterol in eggs will increase your risk of heart disease, this myth has been thoroughly debunked by both epidemiological and clinicalresearch.4 With

Such narratives were recalled in Canada in 2009 amid public-health responses to the H1N1 epidemic, after federal agencies delivered to rural northern Native communities vaccine and face masks accompanied by unmandated body bags. Outraged community health leaders deplored this as a sign that the very agencies charged with protecting them had given up and were being readied for their deaths. Here, an epidemiological reading that public-health measures cannot prevent epidemic in rural northern Native communities appears as the rationalizing logic of a settler colonial biopolitics.

While a 'cure' for HIV would, in effect, decrease Gilead's market share, PrEP not only allows for the capture of those who are HIV+ but has transformed all those who are not into consumers - market saturation as a way of life. Because of PrEP's prohibitive cost, many of those most impacted by HIV, namely young Black, Indigenous, and/or Latinx trans women and MSM as well as IV drug users, have limited, if any, access. The ongoing legacies of colonial medical disinformation swirls with transphobic epidemiology and the homicidal stigmatization of IV drug use that results in the uninterruption of the pandemic for some, while the end of AIDS is habitually proclaimed for others. In a lethal irony, it is the logic of the patent - the argument that innovation is only spurred by the security of private property - that replicates the virus and its differential death. Put plainly, the HIV cells of those taken without their informed consent or compensation, housed in the NIH reagent bank and also laboring in publicly funded labs that produced PrEP, are withheld from the same populations, and perhaps the same people from whom they were initially extracted. The theft of their viral labor helped grow Gilead's incalculable wealth, which includes $36.2 billion in earnings off Truvada alone.

Yet as good as things are, they could be much better, and there are plenty of reasons to worry about the human body's future. Apart from potencial threats posed by climate change, we are also confronting a massive population boom combined with an epidemiological transition. As more people are living longer and fewer are dying young from diseases caused by infections or insufficient food, exponentially middle-aged and elderly people are suffering from chronic noninfectious diseases that used to be rare or unknown.

The sum of the evidence against saturated fat over the past half-century amounts to this: the early trials condemning saturated fat were unsound; the epidemiological data showed no negative association; saturated fat’s effect on LDL-cholesterol (when properly measured in subfractions) is neutral; and a significant body of clinical trials over the past decade has demonstrated the absence of any negative effect of saturated fat on heart disease, obesity, or diabetes. In other words, every plank in the case against saturated fat has, upon rigorous examination, crumbled away. It seems now that what sustains it is not so much science as generations of bias and habit—although, as the latest 2013 AHA-ACC guidelines show, bias and habit present powerful, if not impenetrable, barriers to change.

Any subject whose history ranges from pump handles on London's Broad Street, tide tables, naval gunfire and models of social segregation is bound to have rich parentage. It took 'a village' to beget computational epidemiology: as a true multi-disciplinary subject, it evolved at the crossroads of mathematics, computation, statistics and medicine, with some contributions from systems biology, virology, microbiology, game theory, geography and perhaps even the social sciences.

Few diseases have had an impact on human evolution, culture and society on par with malaria. It is one of the oldest documented infectious diseases. Indeed, it has been hypothesised that the protective effect bestowed by a heterozygous sickle cell allele explains its survival to the modern day. As such, malaria has left its footprint on human evolution in a profound way few other diseases have. Yet its true origins were the matter of considerable controversy. The clue is in the name – the prevailing theory until Ross's discovery was that malaria resulted from 'mala aria', that is, 'bad air'. It took the advent of modern evidence-based medical science to challenge this 'miasma theory'. Ross's elucidation of the role of mosquitoes in the lifecycle of malaria has opened up a new subject for epidemiological consideration: the vector-borne disease.

MARV serves as a poignant example of the way a pathogen that is highly prevalent in its reservoir host population can hide safely without human notice, until in some unfortunate accident, hosts and vectors cross paths.

higher antimicrobial loads will result in a lower total pathogenic load but also a lower involvement of the immune system and therefore less immunity in the long run (as indeed has been empirically demonstrated in a number of experiments summarised in a sweeping review by Benoun (2016)). Thus, while rapid and aggressive antimicrobial treatment is sometimes appropriate, the long-term absence of ensuing CD4+ immunity is its cost.

The culmination of the Trumpist GOP–Far Right alliance occurred on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of violent protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of the presidential election results.33 Trump mostly used populist performance in daily White House press briefings and on Twitter to rebuff expert knowledge and epidemiological protocols coming from the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the U.S. agency primarily responsible for pandemic response), to tout untested treatments like the antimalarial drug Hydroxchloroquine, to refuse to wear a mask, to call for the “liberation” of states from lockdown orders, and to ratchet up nationalism and nativism.

The best and largest cohort studies in nutritional epidemiology, such as the Adventist Health Study, the Iowa Women’s Health Study, the Nurses’ Health Study, the Physicians’ Health Study, and the CARE Study all confirm that eating nuts and seeds is associated with a 30–50 percent decreased risk of CAD death, primarily sudden cardiac death, and dramatic decreases in all-cause mortality.

Epidemiology

progressives. Nobody expects otherwise. In early May, Knut M. Wittkowski, who specialized in biostatistics and epidemiology for twenty years at Rockefeller University, posted a video on YouTube. He offered sane and sober arguments against the American lockdown. YouTube memory-holed it.20 In April, when Wittkowski first began speaking out, his former employer felt compelled to respond, announcing that his views “do not represent the views of The Rockefeller University, its leadership, or its faculty.”21 Now, that normally goes without saying. We’re not aware of any university that says their faculty speak for it. But in the age of social mania, many universities fear the diverse and critical dialog that used to be the essence of higher education. Evidently, Rockefeller University is one of them.

In early May, Knut M. Wittkowski, who specialized in biostatistics and epidemiology for twenty years at Rockefeller University, posted a video on YouTube. He offered sane and sober arguments against the American lockdown. YouTube memory-holed it.20 In April, when Wittkowski first began speaking out, his former employer felt compelled to respond, announcing that his views “do not represent the views of The Rockefeller University, its leadership, or its faculty.”21 Now, that normally goes without saying. We’re not aware of any university that says their faculty speak for it. But in the age of social mania, many universities fear the diverse and critical dialog that used to be the essence of higher education. Evidently, Rockefeller University is one of them.

still up at Medium. Again, it’s your alignment that makes you right, not your credentials or the quality of your arguments. Take Knut Wittkowski, for example, one of the victims of YouTube censorship mentioned above. He’s the former head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Stuttgart and a Doctor of Science degree in medical biometry from the University of Tübingen, both top German universities. He has as much expertise as anyone from WHO. But he was a staunch critic of the lockdowns and the logic behind them. That made him one of the wrong people.

willingness of the scientists to abandon the traditional rules of evidence known as Koch’s postulates. Instead, AIDS researchers, including the ones at the amfAR forum, were willing to “revise Koch’s in a more permissive direction: it would no longer be necessary to find the microbe in all cases of the disease. Mere correlations between microbial antibodies and the progression of the disease would be sufficient. HIV could be proved ‘epidemiologically’ to be the cause of AIDS.” (PBP p.145)

inherently political and the politics of AIDS science are both antigay and racist. Antigayness and racism are hardwired into the epidemiology and pseudoscience of AIDS in the same way that antisemitism was hardwired into Nazi science. I came up with the term “homodemiology” to describe the kind of antigay epidemiology and science that blames diseases and epidemics on gays and cherry-picks or distorts data to support unwarranted and bigoted conclusions. (“Afrodemiology” is my word for the racist version of the same concept.) In the so-called AIDS epidemic, “public health” is the mask that homodemiology and Afrodemiology wear.

There are three essentials for good public health programs. The first is the conviction that the basis for public health is to achieve health equity; therefore, the bottom line is social justice in health. Second is the understanding that the science base is epidemiology. It is epidemiology that determines the gaps in social justice, identifies the groups with poor health outcomes, discovers the details of disease causation, and provides clues to how corrective action might improve health. The third essential is the need for good management for efficient implementation of corrective actions.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind.

Global poverty is half what it was twenty years ago. Violent crimes have abated dramatically in the US, declining from 1993’s high of 79.8 victims per thousand people to our current level of 23.2.2 Per the American Journal of Epidemiology, DUIs are down, likely thanks to chatty drunks opting for rideshare services.3 Bottom line? The data supports that these are the best of times. So . . . why the hell does it feel like the end of days? Why does it seem like it’s about to rain locusts?

The thesis will be advanced that, like all epidemics, this one is the result of medicine’s failure to recognize the nature of the disease—that is, to make an accurate diagnosis. The plague ravaged the world because no one knew anything about bacteriology or epidemiology at the time. It may be hard to believe that highly sophisticated twentieth-century medicine cannot properly identify the cause of something so simple and common as these pain disorders, but physicians and medical researchers are, after all, still human and, therefore, not all-knowing and, most important, subject to the enduring weakness of bias.

Cell biology is inextricably linked with genetics, pathology, epidemiology, epistemology, taxonomy, and anthropology

When Richard Cooper went to medical school at the University of Arkansas in the late 1960s, he was stunned at how many of his black patients were suffering from high blood pressure. He would encounter people in their forties and fifties felled by strokes that left them institutionalized. When Cooper did some research on the problem, he learned that American doctors had first noted the high rate of hypertension in American blacks decades earlier. Cardiologists concluded it must be the result of genetic differences between blacks and whites. Paul Dudley White, the preeminent American cardiologist of the early 1900s, called it a “racial predisposition,” speculating that the relatives of American blacks in West Africa must suffer from high blood pressure as well. Cooper went on to become a cardiologist himself, conducting a series of epidemiological studies on heart disease. In the 1990s, he finally got the opportunity to put the racial predisposition hypothesis to the test. Collaborating with an international network of doctors, Cooper measured the blood pressure of eleven thousand people. Paul Dudley White, it turned out, was wrong. Farmers in rural Nigeria and Cameroon actually had substantially lower blood pressure than American blacks, Cooper found. In fact, they had lower blood pressure than white Americans, too. Most surprisingly of all, Cooper found that people in Finland, Germany, and Spain had higher blood pressure than American blacks. Cooper’s findings don’t challenge the fact that genetic variants can increase people’s risk of developing high blood pressure. In fact, Cooper himself has helped run studies that have revealed some variants in African Americans and Nigerians that can raise that risk. But this genetic inheritance does not, on its own, explain the experiences of African and European Americans. To understand their differences, doctors need to examine the experiences of blacks and whites in the United States—the stress of life in high-crime neighborhoods and the difficulty of getting good health care, for example. These are powerful inheritances, too, but they’re not inscribed in DNA. For scientists carrying out the hard work of disentangling these influences, an outmoded biological concept of race offers no help. In the words of the geneticists Noah Rosenberg and Michael Edge, it has become “a sideshow and a distraction.

In medical jargon, this longer period of illness prior to death is termed the extension of morbidity. Among westernized populations, many people become sick for a long time before they die from heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and chronic respiratory disease; many also suffer from osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, and a growing list of autoimmune diseases.56 At least one in five Americans over the age of sixty-five is in fair or poor health. Despite this high morbidity, we nonetheless live much longer than our farmer ancestors, and a little longer than hunter-gatherers. The average American in 2018 lives to be seventy-eight years old, almost twice as long as one a hundred years ago.57 This shift, in which more of us live longer but die from chronic rather than infectious diseases, thus extending morbidity, is known as the epidemiological transition and widely hailed as medical progress. By not dying rapidly from smallpox in our youth, aren’t we fortunate to die slowly from heart disease at an older age? This thinking is mistaken.

In her 1968 book, The Epidemiology of Depression, Charlotte Silverman, who directed epidemiology studies for the NIMH, noted that community surveys in the 1930s and 1940s had found that fewer than one in a thousand adults suffered an episode of clinical depression each year. Furthermore, most who were struck did not need to be hospitalized. In 1955, there were only 7,250 “first admissions” for depression in state and county mental hospitals. The total number of depressed patients in the nation’s mental hospitals that year was around 38,200, a disability rate of one in every 4,345 people.

The epidemiological evidence for sexual dimorphism in humans is extensive. Sexual dimorphism in body composition is already evident in infancy: males tend to be heavier than females at birth and have longer bodies and larger head circumferences. By early adulthood, sexual dimorphism in fat distribution is highly evident. These are the evolutionary roots of male sensitivity to visual cues of female physical attractiveness and also of women's motivation to display, preserve and improve their physical attractiveness and thus increase their perceived mate value. The extreme end of this adaptation gives rise to the risk of EDs in the modern environment.

Genomics has transformed the biological sciences. From epidemiology and medicine to evolution and forensics, the ability to determine an organism’s complete genetic makeup has changed the way science is done and the questions that can be asked of it. Far and away the most celebrated achievement of genomics is the Human Genome Project, a technologically challenging endeavour that took thousands of scientists around the world thirteen years and ~US$3 billion to complete. In 2000, American President William Clinton referred to the resulting genome sequence as ‘the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.’ Important though it was, this ‘map’ was a low-resolution first pass—a beginning not an endpoint. As of this writing, thousands of human genomes have been sequenced, the primary goals being to better understand our biology in health and disease, and to ‘personalize’ medicine. Sequencing a human genome now takes only a few days and costs as little as US$1,000. The genomes of simple bacteria and viruses can be sequenced in a matter of hours on a device that fits in the palm of your hand. The information is being used in ways unimaginable only a few years ago.

In the absence of a vaccine, those economists, using a fairly standard epidemiological model, estimated that public disclosure information like this not only significantly reduced death numbers in South Korea but could eliminate 73 percent of the economic costs of a full lockdown for a city like Seoul, South Korea’s capital.

During COVID, one challenge with conventional contact tracing is that it’s not an especially efficient use of resources, because the virus is not transmitted at the same rate by everyone who’s infected. If you get the original COVID strain, the chances are not especially high that you’ll pass it along to someone else. (About 70 percent of those cases may not transmit to anyone else at all.) But if you do pass it along to someone else, you probably pass it along to many people. For reasons we don’t entirely understand, 80 percent of COVID infections with early variants came from just 10 percent of the cases. (These numbers could be different for the Omicron variant—as I write this, we don’t have enough data to know.) So with a virus like COVID, using the conventional approach means you’ll spend a lot of time finding people who wouldn’t have infected anyone else—epidemiologically speaking, you’ll find yourself in a lot of cul-de-sacs. What you really want to do is find the main thoroughfares, the relatively small number of people who are causing the most infections.

This is an infectious disease, Conant began. The CDC case-control study may offer some definitive word on how it was spread, but that research was stalled, probably for lack of resources. We are losing time, and time is the enemy in any epidemic. The disease is moving even if the government isn’t.

EC Synkowski based the 800-Gram Challenge on a 2017 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. The researchers analyzed ninety-five studies and concluded that eating 800 grams of fruits and vegetables a day was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, some cancers, and, in fact, all causes of death. In particular, apples, pears, citrus fruits, green leafy vegetables, salads, and cruciferous vegetables (like broccoli and cauliflower) lowered cardiovascular disease and incidence of death; green and yellow vegetables and cruciferous vegetables were associated with lowering cancer risk. Research has long suggested that produce has a protective effect, not just against heart disease and cancer but also other maladies like diabetes and stroke.

epidemiology, microbiology and antibiotic utilization. [Updated List of Scientists Dead in Suspicious Circumstances Since Autumn 2001, Global Elite.] On July 18, 2003, it was reported

...based on epidemiological data, any adult sleeping an average of 6.75 hours a night would be predicted to live only into their early sixties...

Atoms, elements and molecules are three important knowledge in Physics, chemistry and Biology. mathematics comes where counting starts, when counting and measurement started, integers were required. Stephen hawking says integers were created by god and everything else is work of man. Man sees pattern in everything and they are searched and applied to other sciences for engineering, management and application problems. Physics, it is required understand the physical nature or meaning of why it happens, chemistry is for chemical nature, Biology is for that why it happened. Biology touch medicine, plants and animals. In medicine how these atoms, elements and molecules interplay with each other by bondage is being explained. Human emotions and responses are because of biochemistry, hormones i e anatomy and physiology. This physiology deals with each and every organs and their functions. When this atom in elements are disturbed whatever they made i e macromolecules DNA, RNA and Protein and other micro and macro nutrients and which affects the physiology of different organs on different scales and then diseases are born because of this imbalance/ disturb in homeostasis. There many technical words are there which are hard to explain in single para. But let me get into short, these atoms in elements and molecules made interplay because of ecological stimulus i e so called god. and when opposite sex meets it triggers various responses on body of each. It is also harmone and they are acting because of atoms inside elements and continuous generation or degenerations of cell cycle. There is a god cell called totipotent stem cell, less gods are pluripotent, multi potent and noni potent stem cells. So finally each and every organ system including brain cells are affected because of interplay of atoms inside elements and their bondages in making complex molecules, which are ruled by ecological stimulus i e god. So everything is basically biology and medicine even for animals, plants and microbes and other life forms. process differs in each living organisms. The biggest mystery is Brain and DNA. Brain has lots of unexplained phenomenon and even dreams are not completely understood by science that is where spiritualism/ soul touches. DNA is long molecule which has many applications as genetic engineering. genomics, personal medicine, DNA as tool for data storage, DNA in panspermia theory and many more. So everything happens to women and men and other sexes are because of Biology, Medicine and ecology. In ecology every organisms are inter connected and inter dependent. Now physics - it touch all technical aspects but it needs mathematics and statistics to lay foundation for why and how it happened and later chemistry, biology also included inside physics. Mathematics gave raise to computers and which is for fast calculation on any applications in any sciences. As physiological imbalances lead to diseases and disorders, genetic mutations, again old concept evolution was retaken to understand how new biology evolves. For evolution and disease mechanisms, epidemiology and statistics was required and statistics was as a data tool considered in all sciences now a days. Ultimate science is to break the atoms to see what is inside- CERN, but it creates lots of mysterious unanswerable questions. laws in physics were discovered and invented with mathematics to understand the universe from atoms. Theory of everything is a long search and have no answers. While searching inside atoms, so many hypothesis like worm holes and time travel born but not yet invented as far as my knowledge. atom is universe, and humans are universe they have everything that universe has. ecology is god that affects humans and climate. In business these computerized AI applications are trying to figure out human emotions by their mechanism of writing, reading, texting, posting on social media and bla bla. Arts is trying to figure out human emotions in art way.

In the same year as the original Disaster article, Meredeth Turshen attacked the paradigm of clinical medicine as excessively preoccupied with how the individual body reacts to disease, missing the bigger picture of class and other collectivities. She cited Engels’s descriptions of how polluted air, poorly ventilated houses, overcrowded slums and omnipresent sewage predisposed the workers of Manchester to become ill. She could have also quoted Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’ Since the 1970s, critical epidemiology has agreed with critical vulnerability theory on emphasising the social over the natural: disease and disaster as produced through processes internal to society.

in 2020, Robert F. Anda, the co–principal investigator of the initial ACE study, came out with an article and a YouTube video stating that ACEs were a relatively crude way of measuring childhood trauma.[6] The scores are remarkably helpful epidemiologically—for people to understand the overall significance of childhood trauma on public health. But Anda underlined that ACEs are not a good measure of an individual’s life span or health outcomes. There is a wide level of variation for each score. For example, a person with an ACE score of 1 who had extremely frequent instances of their trauma might be just as traumatized as someone with a score of 6 who witnessed a broader breadth of events but experienced them on a much rarer basis. As the following chart shows, there is a lot of overlap. Clearly, people with higher scores do face genuinely larger risks. But the scores are not hard-and-fast determinants. ACE scores also don’t account for whether a child had good resources, such as adults who provided them with safe and loving relationships or therapists who taught them to manage their stress better. They don’t account for gender variation, as PTSD manifests differently in men and women. In his article, Anda cautioned that using ACE scores as an individual screening tool has several risks, including that ACEs “may stigmatize or lead to discrimination…generate client anxiety about toxic-stress physiology, or misclassify individual risk.”[7]

But it is telling that, based on epidemiological data, any adult sleeping an average of 6.75 hours a night would be predicted to live only into their early sixties: very close to the median life span of these tribespeople.

Knowledge is useless if not communicated, but it is also useless if not understood.

Both experimental and epidemiological studies show that the driving impairments caused by talking on a cell phone are comparable to the effects of driving while legally intoxicated.

After years of examining the accumulating evidence, eight top health organizations joined forces and agreed to encourage Americans to eat more unrefined plant food and less food from animal sources, as revealed in the dietary guidelines published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. These authorities are the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Council on Cardiovascular Disease in the Young, the Council on Epidemiology and Prevention, the American Dietetic Association, the Division of Nutrition Research of the National Institutes of Health, and the American Society for Clinical Nutrition. Their unified guidelines are a giant step in the right direction. Their aim is to offer protection against the major chronic diseases in America, including heart disease and cancer. “The emphasis is on eating a variety of foods, mostly fruits and vegetables, with very little simple sugar or high-fat foods, especially animal foods,” said

The putative abortion and breast cancer link is a notable example of Internet disinformation. Flawed studies led some authors without medical or epidemiological training to conclude that abortion increases the risk of subsequent breast cancer; large, national studies free of recall bias refute any such link.37,38 Despite the conclusion of objective medical organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the National Cancer Institute, the disinformation campaign is unrelenting.

population subsets.

I am very fortunate to know T. Colin Campbell, PhD, professor emeritus of Cornell University and coauthor of the ground-breaking The China Study. I strongly recommend this book; it’s an expansive and hugely informative work on the effects of food on health. Campbell’s work is regarded by many as the definitive epidemiological examination of the relationship between diet and disease. He has received more than seventy grant years of peer-reviewed research funding (the gold standard of research), much of it from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and he has authored more than 300 research papers. Dr. Campbell grew up on a dairy farm and believed wholeheartedly in the health value of eating animal protein. Indeed, he set out in his career to investigate how to produce more and better animal protein. Troublesome to his preconceived opinion about the goodness of dairy, Campbell kept running up against results that pointed to a different truth: that animal protein is disastrous to human health. Through a variety of experimental study designs, epidemiological evidence (studies of what affects the illness and health of populations), and observation of real-life conditions that had rational, biological explanations, Dr. Campbell has made a direct and powerful correlation between cancer and animal protein. For this book I asked Dr. Campbell to explain a little about how and why nutrition (both good and bad) affects cancer in our bodies.

Artificial sweeteners (noncaloric sweeteners, as the USDA calls them) as a replacement for sugar muddy these waters even more. Much of the anxiety about these sweeteners was generated in the 1960s and 1970s by the research, partly funded by the sugar industry, as we’ve seen, that led to the banning of cyclamates as a possible carcinogen, and the suggestion that saccharin could cause cancer (at least in rats, at extraordinarily high doses). Though this particular anxiety has tapered off with time, it has been replaced by the suggestion that maybe these artificial sweeteners can cause metabolic syndrome, and thus obesity and diabetes. This conjecture comes primarily from epidemiological studies that show an association between the use of artificial sweeteners and obesity and diabetes. But whether this means artificial sweeteners cause obesity and diabetes is, again, impossible to say.

In 1981, when the Oxford University researchers Richard Peto and Sir Richard Doll (knighted for his work linking cigarettes to lung cancer in the 1950s) published what was then the seminal article on cancer epidemiology, they estimated that perhaps three out of every four cases of cancer in the United States might be preventable with appropriate changes in diet and lifestyle. Diet, they argued, seemed to play the largest role. According to Peto and Doll’s analysis, at least 10 percent of all cancers, and perhaps as much as 70 percent, were caused by something that we were eating.

Krieger took the first scientific step by partnering with physician Stephen Sidney to specifically measure research participants’ exposure to racial discrimination and test its association with high blood pressure. Instead of treating race as a biological risk factor, as was typical in epidemiological research, Krieger zoomed in on racism as a cause of disease and developed a fledgling methodology to measure its health impact directly. Her findings, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1996, were the first to show that experiencing racial discrimination raises the risk of high blood pressure.

Inhabitants of isolated or remote regions where there has been little or no contact with the outside world are often described as “epidemiologically naive.” What this means is that they have limited immunity to diseases like influenza and measles that are endemic in other parts of the world, and when exposed to them they often suffer high rates of death. One of the best-known examples comes from the pandemic of 1918, in which certain populations, notably indigenous Alaskans and Pacific Islanders, died at rates that were four, five, and in some cases even ten times those of other populations. The pandemic is thought to have killed between 3 and 6 percent of the global population; in Western Samoa, 20 percent of the population died. In the nineteenth-century Pacific, this scenario played itself out over and over.

For the first paper, Krauss and his colleagues concluded that “saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk” for heart disease or stroke. This was the first time a researcher had analyzed all the epidemiological studies together, and Krauss found that they amounted to an absence of incriminating evidence.

Based on epidemiological studies of average sleep time, millions of individuals unwittingly spend years of their life in a sub-optimal state of psychological and physiological functioning, never maximizing their potential of mind or body due to their blind persistence in sleeping too little.

Widening the lens of focus, there are more than twenty large-scale epidemiological studies that have tracked millions of people over many decades, all of which report the same clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations—diseases that are crippling health-care systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer—all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep.

A common feature of epidemiological data is that they are almost certain to be biased, of doubtful quality, or incomplete (and sometimes all three),” explained the epidemiologist John Bailar in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. “Problems do not disappear even if one has flawless data, since the statistical associations in almost any nontrivial set of observations are subject to many interpretations. This ambiguity exists because of the difficulty of sorting out causes, effects, concomitant variables, and random fluctuations when the causes are multiple or diffuse, the exposure levels low, irregular, or hard to measure, and the relevant biologic mechanisms poorly understood. Even when the data are generally accepted as accurate, there is much room for individual judgment, and the considered conclusions of the investigators on these matters determine what they will label ‘cause’…

The evidence to support cutting out meat consumption is very strong. From studies showing pathophysiologic changes (doctor-speak for “bad stuff happening in the body”) associated with animal consumption that hypothetically could cause heart disease, to epidemiologic studies to randomized control trials, it’s easy to see that the less animal protein, the happier your heart.

Many disciplines and epistemological domains now acknowledge that our neurobiology is intimately marked by the social, cultural, and environmental circumstances in which our lives take shape. Indeed, a range of disciplines and approaches – including, most prominently, social neuroscience (Cacioppo 2002), environmental epigenetics (see Niewöhner 2015; Pickersgill et al. 2013), and social epidemiology (Krieger 2001) – have lately emerged, or redefined their already-existing mission, in order to trace the multiplicity of ways in which, to use the cliché du jour, the social ‘gets under the skin’ (e.g. see Ferraro and Shippee 2009; Hertzman and Boyce 2010; Hyman 2009; McEwen 2012).

In a long-range study of 91,000 nurses over twelve years, the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard showed that the risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women is twice as high in those who eat red meat more than once a day as in those who consume it less than three times a week .97 The risk of breast cancer could therefore be halved simply by reducing consumption of red meat.

8.2Concept map of the association of renal function and cardiovascular mortality revealing more of the confounding influences Since many of these variables are rarely measured or quantified in large epidemiologic studies, significant residual confounding

critical part of the research process is deciding what types of data are needed to answer the research question. Administrative/claims data, secondary use of clinical trial data, prospective epidemiologic studies, and electronic

Type of observational research Purpose Epidemiological Define incidence, prevalence, and risk factors for disease Predictive modeling Predict future outcomes Comparative effectiveness Identify intervention associated with superior outcomes Pharmacovigilance Detect rare drug adverse events occurring in the long-term

One of the most important problems in epidemiology is to ascertain whether this termination occurs only when no susceptible individuals are left, or whether the interplay of the various factors of infectivity, recovery and mortality, may result in termination, whilst many susceptible individuals are still present in the unaffected population.

More generally, religious pilgrimages rivaled warfare in provoking epidemic infection. The doctrine that disease came from God could easily be interpreted to mean that it was impious to interfere with God's purposes by trying to take conscious precaution against disease, either in war or on pilgrimage. Part of the meaning of pilgrimage was the taking of risks in pursuit of holiness. To die en route was, for the pious, and act of God whereby He deliberately translated the pilgrim from the hardships of life on earth into His presence. Disease and pilgrimage were thus psychologically as well as epidemiologically complementary. The same may be said of war, where risk of sudden death -one's own or the enemy's- was at the very core of the enterprise.

But influenza is not simply a bad cold. It is a quite specific disease, with a distinct set of symptoms and epidemiological behavior. In humans the virus directly attacks only the respiratory system, and it becomes increasingly dangerous as it penetrates deeper into the lungs. Indirectly it affects many parts of the body, and even a mild infection can cause pain in muscles and joints, intense headache, and prostration.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind. The evidence comes from Dr. Loring Miner.

The medical basis for the preventorium was a new understanding of the epidemiology of tuberculosis made possible by Koch’s tuberculin skin test.

Until the Indian Plague Commission in 1908–1909 established the complex role of rats and fleas, the epidemiology of the disease therefore remained a mystery.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind. The evidence comes from Dr. Loring Miner. •

the process of reverse transcription is central to the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS because it is highly prone to error. Thus it causes mutations with great frequency, creating varieties, or “clades,” of HIV and underlying the development of drug resistance.

sample size. Sample sizes can be calculated not only for randomized trials but

Ironically, given the high-tech quality of the diagnostic and monitoring effort, the containment policies were based on traditional methods dating from the public health strategies against bubonic plague of the seventeenth century and the foundation of epidemiology as a discipline in the nineteenth century—case tracking, isolation, quarantine, the cancellation of mass gatherings, the surveillance of travelers, recommendations to increase personal hygiene, and barrier protection by means of masks, gowns, gloves, and eye protection. Although SARS affected twenty-nine countries and five continents, the containment operation successfully limited the outbreak primarily to hospital settings, with only sporadic community involvement. By July 5, 2003, WHO could announce that the pandemic was over.

Medical historians and anthropologists have studied the ways in which decisions over disease aetiology, transmission pathways, and other key epidemiological traits regarding a given outbreak are influenced by social, economic, and political factors.

The epidemiological reasoning evident in this epistemic entanglement is a rich field for medical anthropological and historical investigation into the ‘ethnographic configuration of plague’ (ibid.).

The question is no longer what technology can do, but whether we can adapt fast enough to shape its trajectory before it shapes us beyond recognition. - Tom Golway

Even though Charcot described sclérose en plaque disseminée as a disease primarily of women, such as his wards in the Salpêtrière, his successors were convinced until the early twentieth century that it was an affliction of men: men who reported sudden, transient blindness or paralysis were given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, their symptoms assumed to be the result of a physical malady, a lesion of the brain or spinal cord, while women with the same fluctuating symptoms were dismissed as hysterical. Until even more recently, for perhaps the same reasons, multiple sclerosis was deemed an affliction of white women. We now understand that it affects Black and brown women just as often. Black women are still diagnosed much later in the course of their illness than white women, often with worse symptoms by the time a diagnosis is made. Centuries after Charcot died, I would read the paper “Multiple Sclerosis and Hysteria,” published in 1980. “Multiple sclerosis,” the authors explained, “shares with hysteria a common epidemiology (young patients and preponderantly women), prevalence, and frequency of equivocal, difficult-to-verify abnormal neurological signs.

Inshape your future with hard work." — Ganesh Khadka

Propagated as the standard work on the subject, the central, entirely unscientific thesis of the book Magische Gifte (“Magic Poisons”) posits: “The greatest toxic effect is always produced by narcotics alien to the country and the race.”35 Jews and drugs merged into a single toxic or epidemiological unit that menaced Germany: “For decades our people have been told by Marxists and Jews: ‘Your body belongs to you.’ That was taken to mean that at social occasions between men, or between men and women, any quantities of alcohol could be enjoyed, even at the cost of the body’s health. Irreconcilable with this Jewish Marxist view is the Teutonic German idea that we are the bearers of the eternal legacy of our ancestors, and that accordingly our body belongs to the clan and the people.”36

This is a powerful way to tackle complex problems, but it is a double-edged sword. Connectionist AI is prone to becoming a “black box”—capable of spitting out the correct answer, but unable to explain how it found it.[24] This has the potential to become a major issue because people will want to be able to see the reasoning behind high-stakes decisions about things like medical treatment, law enforcement, epidemiology, or risk management.

Memes have always been kind of like a virus. Whenever you learn a new word, you can think of it as coming into contact with a parasite. Either your guard is up and you reject the word, or it breaks through your defenses and you become a “host,” using and replicating the word for it to reach a larger population. Then there’s the uncanny similarity between how we talk about the ways that words and diseases spread: We say they move through social networks in a “viral” manner, hence the phrase “gone viral.” Many linguists even use epidemiological models to show the spread or lifespan of ideas.

The compliance effect has led to some famously strange epidemiological results. One long-term study showed that people who took a placebo were half as likely to die as those who did not. Was the placebo protecting them in some way the researchers had failed to anticipate? Hardly. It turned out that simply taking the placebo regularly was a signpost for a wholly different lifestyle. The pill takers were simply more actively engaged in their health across the board.

Deborah Dawson of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Division of Biometry and Epidemiology, once lamented the lack of credible data in the study of addiction treatment: “Few, if any, studies have assessed the impact of different types of treatment on both the probability and rapidity of recovery, i.e. on person-years of dependence averted.”5 Her principal complaint: the lack of controls in most AA studies.

But for the time being, an insistence on racism and antiracism as the sole means of looking at any and every problem remains much greater, clearer, and all-encompassing. That is why, for instance, other medical practitioners from Harvard on down can blame all racial health disparities on whiteness (“anti-racist epidemiology”),79 claim that systemic racism is to blame for the deaths of pregnant black women,80 and assert that when white Americans volunteer their DNA for scientific experiments, these white Americans are subtly doing so in order to victimize nonwhite groups.81 Overall, the message is that whiteness itself is a pandemic. As one New York Times contributing editor recently put it, whiteness is “a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect.”82