Archives
Domestic Threats to Public Health in the United States
Posted on April 1, 2018
If you’ve been watching the news, you might have noticed that something interesting is going in Italy. They just had a general election, and their results were very interesting. This is from The Atlantic: “Anyone who’s spent more than a vacation in Italy knows it’s a country with deep reserves of discontent, economic stagnation, and […]
The Thing About Hotspots
Posted on March 19, 2018 3 Comments
No, I’m not talking about wifi hotspots that help you connect to the internet so you can watch cat videos. I’m talking about the symbology used on maps in order to emphasize an area (or areas) where there is a lot of something going on. For example, in infectious disease epidemiology, I might use a […]
Whose Fault Is It That I’m Fat?
Posted on February 17, 2018
We were talking in an epidemiology class the other day about the association between obesity and diabetes. It’s a pretty strong association, with a lot of good evidence that obesity causes diabetes. As the students and the professor talked about this, the other teaching assistant in the course took some pictures of us. I was standing […]
The Parent Ren, Part VII: The Pathogens Strike Back
Posted on December 13, 2017
I remember being a child and having Strep throat in the summer a couple of times. It was miserable. It was so bad that I could not wait to go see the doctor and have my grandmother give me a shot of penicillin. (I spent most summers with my grandparents in the ancestral hometown in […]
The Perfect Disease Surveillance System
Posted on August 23, 2016 4 Comments
How is it that we get to know about diseases like Zika or Ebola? Is it just dumb luck that we encounter patients and then go from there? In a way, yes. These diseases, especially novel ones, have a way of just popping onto the radar without warning. Then we respond vigorously because we weren’t […]
Where do you begin to understand Zika?
Posted on February 7, 2016 5 Comments
It’s all the rage these days to get worked-up about Zika. Just like last year with Ebola, this year we’re freaking out over a disease from “over there” coming “over here” and hurting Americans. Also, the observed association between Zika infection in pregnancy and microcephaly is scaring the crap out of people. (It’s really scaring […]
EpidemioLogical 