What do rising mortality rates tell us?

W hen I was a student at a school of public health in the late '70s, the focus was on chronic disease. This was when the health and dise...

Big Pharmamortality ratesopioidspublic healthSESsocial epidemiology

Playing the Big Fiddle while Rome burns?

W e've seemed to have forgotten the trust-busting era that was necessary to control monopolistic acquisition of resources.  That was ove...

antibiotic resistanceepidemiologygeneticsprioritiespublic healthscience

Heavy metals, heavy conflicts and autism?

Two papers are presented for your reading delight today, both based on the often contentious issue of heavy metals and autism . The first pa...

autismheavy metalsleadmercurypublic healthresearchrisk

The US Health Disadvantage

 Mobilization of an unprecedented kind is now necessary in the United States. It requires a campaign to remove the public veil ...

complex causationhealth disparitiespublic health

Collecting data is easy; making sense of it is not

Big Data More Big Data is on the horizon -- a new estimate of the number of viruses in known mammal species harbor is generating excitement ...

Big Datapublic healthvirodiversity

Drinking your way to....health? oblivion? cancer? More on 'evidence based' medicine

Perhaps the main concern of our blog is to understand biological causation. Our interests are general, but the issue comes up disproportion...

alcoholcancercausationdrinking riskepidemiologyepistemologyevidence-based medicinepublic health

The simple facts of life

Here we report on some reflections after our participation in a meeting on the 'New Genomics in Medicine and Public Health' held at ...

association studiesbiomedical geneticsGenetic causationGWASpublic health