1. So, You Want to be an Epidemiologist? Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Epidemiology in 60 minutes or less. Presented by: Carmine Jabri
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Editor's Notes
Schnieder (2006) describes how John Snow noticed that death rates from a cholera epidemic in London, were high in parts of the city where the water was supplied by two companies who drew their water from areas of the Thames river that were heavily polluted. Then one of the companies changed it source to an unpolluted area of the river. Snow noticed that the number of cholera deaths declined in the area of the city that was supplied with the unpolluted water and did not decline in the area supplied with polluted water. In 1853, there was a severe outbreak in the Broad Street area, so he went to each house where someone had died of cholera in the time period of August 1853- January 1854 to discover which company supplied the water. He found that the rate of cholera deaths was eight and one-half times higher in houses supplied with polluted water than those supplied with unpolluted water. What was notable about this was that this was during a time that “most people thought that diseases were caused by malodorous vapors” (McKenzie et al, 2005, p. 472) This also happened, “30 years before Louis Pasteur proposed his germ theory of disease”(McKenzie et al., 2005, p. 63). This was the “first example of the use of epidemiology to study and control a disease” (Schneider, 2006, p. 52). Thereby linking the, “new science of Epidemiology with the use of geographic information to reveal relationships between environment and disease” (Novick et al, 2008, p. 329). Koch demonstrated, “for the first time in any human disease a strict relation between a micro-organism and a disease” (Friis & Sellers, 2004, p. 34). Koch developed the “criteria and procedures necessary to establish that a particular microbe, and no other, causes a particular disease” (McKenzie et al., 2005, p. 11). They are now referred to as the Henle-Koch postulates (Friis & Sellers, 2004, p. 67). The developments and discoveries made by Koch resulted in identifying many disease-causing bacteria, linking them to the causation of particular diseases. This led to, “new opportunities to control infectious diseases, including improved diagnosis, understanding of carrier states and insight into the importance of vectors” (Novick et al., 2008, p. 11).