3 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2019
    1. The mapping of social, ethnic, gender, and other inequalities are key to epidemiology, beyond its concern (as a public health science) with inequity. For those epidemiologists who denigrate our discipline for engaging with social deprivation (107), it is perhaps worth considering that health inequalities for particular causes can favor the less powerful social groups (108, 109), and this provides at least as much evidence regarding disease etiology as does the more usual (but apparently uninteresting) concentration of misery on the expropriated.

      Relevant as ever.

    2. Remarkably, studies receiving mainly public funding can, a quarter of a century on, still survive without making their data available in a useful way. In the UK a series of studies—the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) (100), UK Biobank (101), and Born in Bradford (102), among others—have surely been exemplary in promoting data accessibility.

      Critical points!

    3. Peto's paradox :A man has 1000 times as many cells as a mouse... and we usually live at least 30 times as long as mice. Exposure of two similar organisms to risk of carcinoma, one for 30 times as long as the other, would give perhaps 304 or 306 (i.e., a million or a billion) times the risk of carcinoma induction per epithelial cell. However, it seems that, in the wild, the probabilities of carcinoma induction in mice and in men are not vastly different. Are our stem cells really, then, a billion or a trillion times more "cancerproof" than murine stem cells? This is biologically pretty implausible; if human DNA is no more resistant to mutagenesis in vitro than mouse DNA, why don't we all die of multiple carcinomas at an early age?

      — "Epidemiology and Multistage Models", 1977[4]