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What Are We Selling in Public Health?
Posted on October 23, 2018
There isn’t a week that goes by where someone doesn’t call me a “Pharma Shill.” They claim that I must be getting paid by “Big Pharma” because I dare say that vaccines say lives and counter the claims of antivaxxers on social media. (“Claims” is a gentler way of saying “outright lies.”) As of the writing […]
EpiRen’s Journal Club: Firearm-Related Hospitalization and Risk of Bad Stuff Thereafter, in Washington State, Between 2006 and 2011
Posted on May 9, 2018 2 Comments
This study is pretty interesting… Researchers in Washington State took hospital records from 2006 and 2007 and found all the firearm-related hospitalizations (FRH) through diagnosis codes. They then matched those cases with hospitalized patients who were not hospitalized for FRH. They used frequency matching, which is one of the various types of matching you do when conducting […]
How Do Anti-Vaccine Advocates React to a Vaccine Bill in New Jersey? Hint: Not Very Well
Posted on April 6, 2018
I won’t bore you with the details because the video is quite good on its own. Basically, NJ legislators in a committee voted to advance a bill for a vote. The bill would require parents seeking a vaccine exemption for attending school to do one of several things. They can get a physician to write […]
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 […]
America First by Neglecting the World?
Posted on February 7, 2018 2 Comments
As you may or may not have heard, Brenda Fitzgerald, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), resigned from her post last week. Some point to her investment in tobacco and pharmaceutical companies as the reason why she left. Others don’t care why she left, as long as Anne Schuchat is […]
The Dark Days of the Republic
Posted on August 17, 2017
CSPAN had some very good programs on about the Civil War in the last few days. Not a bad idea given how quickly everyone forgot what really went on during that conflict. Even the man who perfected the shade of orange that Cheetos wanted to achieve for decades, our President, didn’t seem to understand the […]
What we should have been doing all along: Translational Epidemiology
Posted on May 26, 2017
When I was applying to get into the DrPH program, the interviewer — who would later become my academic advisor — asked me for my thoughts on Translational Epidemiology. Translational Epidemiology (TE) is the use of epidemiology in different stages between identifying a population-level problem to identifying a solution for it, to evaluating what that […]
Non-Biostatistician, Non-Epidemiologist Tries to Complain About Biostats and Epi
Posted on April 29, 2017
Don’t you love it when people who don’t know better think that they know better, and then they end up making fools of themselves? There is a particularly interesting anti-vaccine man by the name of Brian S. Hooker. He has a doctorate in biochemical engineering, according to his Wikipedia page. Maybe you remember BS Hooker […]
Navigating the Political Seas
Posted on January 25, 2017
Imagine for a minute that you are a resident of Puerto Rico. If you were born there, then you are a citizen of the United States. However, your vote for President doesn’t count since Puerto Rico doesn’t have any votes in the Electoral College. Congress makes laws that affect you but you don’t have any […]
Public Health is in a bit of a pickle over the nasal flu vaccine
Posted on June 29, 2016 4 Comments
No more FluMist vaccine for flu this coming flu season. What are the implications? Many.
EpidemioLogical 