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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.