Articles

Issues in the construction of wealth indices for the measurement of socio-economic position in low-income countries

Epidemiological studies often require measures of socio-economic position (SEP). The application of principal components analysis (PCA) to data on asset-ownership is one popular approach to household SEP measu...

Authors: Laura D Howe, James R Hargreaves and Sharon RA Huttly

Simpson's Paradox, Lord's Paradox, and Suppression Effects are the same phenomenon – the reversal paradox

This article discusses three statistical paradoxes that pervade epidemiological research: Simpson's paradox, Lord's paradox, and suppression. These paradoxes have important implications for the interpretation of ...

Authors: Yu-Kang Tu, David Gunnell and Mark S Gilthorpe

Open access for the non-English-speaking world: overcoming the language barrier

This editorial highlights the problem of language barrier in scientific communication in spite of the recent success of Open Access Movement. Four options for English-language journals to overcome the language...

Authors: Isaac CH Fung

Estimating the role of casual contact from the community in transmission of Bordetella pertussis to young infants

The proportion of infant pertussis cases due to transmission from casual contact in the community has not been estimated since before the introduction of pertussis vaccines in the 1950s. This study aimed to es...

Authors: Aaron M Wendelboe, Michael G Hudgens, Charles Poole and Annelies Van Rie

Geographic variation and localised clustering of congenital anomalies in Great Britain

Environmental pollution as a cause of congenital anomalies is sometimes suspected because of clustering of anomalies in areas of higher exposure. This highlights questions around spatial heterogeneity (cluster...

Authors: Ben G Armstrong, Helen Dolk, Sam Pattenden, Martine Vrijheid, Maria Loane, Judith Rankin, Chris E Dunn, Chris Grundy, Lenore Abramsky, Patricia A Boyd, David Stone and Diana Wellesley

Methods for health surveys in difficult settings: charting progress, moving forward

Health surveys are a very important component of the epidemiology toolbox, and play a critical role in gauging population health, especially in developing countries. Research on health survey methods, however,...

Authors: Kristof Bostoen, Oleg O Bilukha, Bridget Fenn, Oliver W Morgan, Clarence C Tam, Annemarie ter Veen and Francesco Checchi

Who should be undertaking population-based surveys in humanitarian emergencies?

Timely and accurate data are necessary to prioritise and effectively respond to humanitarian emergencies. 30-by-30 cluster surveys are commonly used in humanitarian emergencies because of their purported simpl...

Authors: Paul B Spiegel

Mortality and nutrition surveys by Non-Governmental organisations. Perspectives from the CE-DAT database

In this paper we explore the strengths and gaps among NGO surveys based on an analysis of the records held in the CE-DAT database at CRED. We conclude by recommending the priority areas for strengthening NGO c...

Authors: Olivier Degomme and Debarati Guha-Sapir

A review of methodology and analysis of nutrition and mortality surveys conducted in humanitarian emergencies from October 1993 to April 2004

Malnutrition prevalence and mortality rates are increasingly used as essential indicators to assess the severity of a crisis, to follow trends, and to guide decision-making, including allocation of funds. Alth...

Authors: Claudine Prudhon and Paul B Spiegel

Wanted: studies on mortality estimation methods for humanitarian emergencies, suggestions for future research

Measuring rates and circumstances of population mortality (in particular crude and under-5 year mortality rates) is essential to evidence-based humanitarian relief interventions. Because prospective vital even...

Authors:

Don't spin the pen: two alternative methods for second-stage sampling in urban cluster surveys

In two-stage cluster surveys, the traditional method used in second-stage sampling (in which the first household in a cluster is selected) is time-consuming and may result in biased estimates of the indicator ...

Authors: Rebecca F Grais, Angela MC Rose and Jean-Paul Guthmann

Optimisation of the T-square sampling method to estimate population sizes

Population size and density estimates are needed to plan resource requirements and plan health related interventions. Sampling frames are not always available necessitating surveys using non-standard household...

Authors: Kristof Bostoen, Zaid Chalabi and Rebecca F Grais

Sampling in health geography: reconciling geographical objectives and probabilistic methods. An example of a health survey in Vientiane (Lao PDR)

Geographical objectives and probabilistic methods are difficult to reconcile in a unique health survey. Probabilistic methods focus on individuals to provide estimates of a variable's prevalence with a certain...

Authors: Julie Vallée, Marc Souris, Florence Fournet, Audrey Bochaton, Virginie Mobillion, Karine Peyronnie and Gérard Salem

The use of personal digital assistants for data entry at the point of collection in a large household survey in southern Tanzania

Survey data are traditionally collected using pen-and-paper, with double data entry, comparison of entries and reconciliation of discrepancies before data cleaning can commence. We used Personal Digital Assist...

Authors: Kizito Shirima, Oscar Mukasa, Joanna Armstrong Schellenberg, Fatuma Manzi, Davis John, Adiel Mushi, Mwifadhi Mrisho, Marcel Tanner, Hassan Mshinda and David Schellenberg

Assessing household wealth in health studies in developing countries: a comparison of participatory wealth ranking and survey techniques from rural South Africa

Accurate tools for assessing household wealth are essential for many health studies in developing countries. Household survey and participatory wealth ranking (PWR) are two approaches to generate data for this...

Authors: James R Hargreaves, Linda A Morison, John SS Gear, Julia C Kim, Mzamani B Makhubele, John DH Porter, Charlotte Watts and Paul M Pronyk

Age standardisation – an indigenous standard?

The study of inequities in health is a critical component of monitoring government obligations to uphold the rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Aotearoa/New Zealand the indigenous Māori population has a substant...

Authors: Bridget Robson, Gordon Purdie, Fiona Cram and Shirley Simmonds

Early efforts in modeling the incubation period of infectious diseases with an acute course of illness

The incubation period of infectious diseases, the time from infection with a microorganism to onset of disease, is directly relevant to prevention and control. Since explicit models of the incubation period en...

Authors: Hiroshi Nishiura

Risk factor studies of age-at-onset in a sample ascertained for Parkinson disease affected sibling pairs: a cautionary tale

An association between exposure to a risk factor and age-at-onset of disease may reflect an effect on the rate of disease occurrence or an acceleration of the disease process. The difference in age-at-onset ar...

Authors: Jemma B Wilk and Timothy L Lash

The role of sexually transmitted infections in male circumcision effectiveness against HIV – insights from clinical trial simulation

A landmark randomised trial of male circumcision (MC) in Orange Farm, South Africa recently showed a large and significant reduction in risk of HIV infection, reporting MC effectiveness of 61% (95% CI: 34%–77%...

Authors: Kamal Desai, Marie-Claude Boily, Geoff P Garnett, Benoît R Mâsse, Stephen Moses and Robert C Bailey

Pathways to health: a framework for health-focused research and practice

Public health research and practice is faced with three problems: 1) a focus on disease instead of health, 2) consideration of risk factor/disease relationships one at a time, and 3) attention to individuals w...

Authors: Nancy L Fleischer, Ann M Weber, Susan Gruber, Karina Z Arambula, Maya Mascarenhas, Jessica A Frasure, Constance Wang and S Leonard Syme

Identifying related cancer types based on their incidence among people with multiple cancers

There are several reasons that someone might be diagnosed with more than one primary cancer. The aim of this analysis was to determine combinations of cancer types that occur more often than expected. The expe...

Authors: Chris D Bajdik, Zenaida U Abanto, John J Spinelli, Angela Brooks-Wilson and Richard P Gallagher

Ethical issues in epidemiologic research and public health practice

A rich and growing body of literature has emerged on ethics in epidemiologic research and public health practice. Recent articles have included conceptual frameworks of public health ethics and overviews of hi...

Authors: Steven S Coughlin

Migration and health: fact, fiction, art, politics

The recent Immigration Bill debate in the United States Congress has again re-ignited the polemic regarding immigration policy. In this essay, I argue that disputes surrounding the legality of migrant workers ...

Authors: Clarence C Tam

Individual freedom versus collective responsibility: too many rights make a wrong?

Individuals might reasonably expect the freedom to make their own decisions regarding their health. However, what happens when an individual's wishes conflict with what is in that individual's best interests? ...

Authors: Katharine J Looker and Timothy B Hallett

Individual freedoms versus collective responsibility: immunization decision-making in the face of occasionally competing values

Modern public health strives for maximizing benefits for the highest number of people while protecting individual rights. Restrictions on individual rights are justified for two reasons-for the benefit of the ...

Authors: Daniel A Salmon and Saad B Omer

Individual freedom versus collective responsibility: an economic epidemiology perspective

Individuals' free choices in vaccination do not guarantee social optimum since individuals' decision is based on imperfect information, and vaccination decision involves positive externality. Public policy of ...

Authors: M Zia Sadique

Individual freedom versus collective responsibility: an ethicist's perspective

Philosophical theories of collective action have produced a number of alternative accounts of the rationality and morality of self-interest and altruism. These have obvious applications to communicable disease...

Authors: Richard E Ashcroft

Mixing patterns and the spread of close-contact infectious diseases

Surprisingly little is known regarding the human mixing patterns relevant to the spread of close-contact infections, such as measles, influenza and meningococcal disease. This study aims to estimate the number...

Authors: WJ Edmunds, G Kafatos, J Wallinga and JR Mossong

Stochastic modeling of empirical time series of childhood infectious diseases data before and after mass vaccination

The goal of this paper is to analyze the stochastic dynamics of childhood infectious disease time series. We present an univariate time series analysis of pertussis, mumps, measles and rubella based on Box-Jen...

Authors: Helen Trottier, Pierre Philippe and Roch Roy

Getting causal considerations back on the right track

In their commentary on my paper Phillips and Goodman suggested that counterfactual causality and considerations on causality like those by Bradford Hill are only "guideposts on the road to common sense". I arg...

Authors: Michael Höfler

Non-differential measurement error does not always bias diagnostic likelihood ratios towards the null

Diagnostic test evaluations are susceptible to random and systematic error. Simulated non-differential random error for six different error distributions was evaluated for its effect on measures of diagnostic ...

Authors: GT Fosgate

Regression analysis with categorized regression calibrated exposure: some interesting findings

Regression calibration as a method for handling measurement error is becoming increasingly well-known and used in epidemiologic research. However, the standard version of the method is not appropriate for expo...

Authors: Ingvild Dalen, John P Buonaccorsi, Petter Laake, Anette Hjartåker and Magne Thoresen

Causal criteria and counterfactuals; nothing more (or less) than scientific common sense

Two persistent myths in epidemiology are that we can use a list of "causal criteria" to provide an algorithmic approach to inferring causation and that a modern "counterfactual model" can assist in the same en...

Authors: Carl V Phillips and Karen J Goodman

Hospitalisation among immigrants in Italy

Immigration is increasing in Italy. In 2003, 2.6 million foreign citizens lived in the country; 52% were men and the majority were young adults who migrated for work. The purpose of this study was to investiga...

Authors: Laura Cacciani, Giovanni Baglio, Lorenza Rossi, Enrico Materia, Maurizio Marceca, Salvatore Geraci, Angela Spinelli, John Osborn and Gabriella Guasticchi

The basic principles of migration health: Population mobility and gaps in disease prevalence

Currently, migrants and other mobile individuals, such as migrant workers and asylum seekers, are an expanding global population of growing social, demographic and political importance. Disparities often exist...

Authors: Brian D Gushulak and Douglas W MacPherson

Sib-recruitment for studying migration and its impact on obesity and diabetes

Urban-rural comparisons are of limited relevance in examining the effects of urban migration in developing countries where urbanisation is due to growth of existing urban populations, expansion of urban bounda...

Authors: Tanica Lyngdoh, Sanjay Kinra, Yoav Ben Shlomo, Srinath Reddy, Dorairaj Prabhakaran, George Davey Smith and Shah Ebrahim

Two Surgeon General's reports on smoking and cancer: a historical investigation of the practice of causal inference

The epidemiologic literature is replete with conceptual discussions about causal inference, but little is known about how the causal criteria are applied in public health practice. The criteria for causal infe...

Authors: Mark Parascandola, Douglas L Weed and Abhijit Dasgupta

AIDS, conflict and the media in Africa: risks in reporting bad data badly

Conflict, poverty and HIV disproportionately affect people in sub-Saharan Africa. The manner in which governments, national and international organisations and the media report on the HIV epidemic in situation...

Authors: Massimo Lowicki-Zucca, Paul Spiegel and Filippo Ciantia

The Bradford Hill considerations on causality: a counterfactual perspective

Bradford Hill's considerations published in 1965 had an enormous influence on attempts to separate causal from non-causal explanations of observed associations. These considerations were often applied as a che...

Authors: Michael Höfler

Biodemographic perspectives for epidemiologists

A new scientific discipline arose in the late 20^th century known as biodemography. When applied to aging, biodemography is the scientific study of common age patterns and causes of death observed among humans and...

Authors: S Jay Olshansky, Mark Grant, Jacob Brody and Bruce A Carnes

The epidemiological impact of antiretroviral use predicted by mathematical models: a review

This review summarises theoretical studies attempting to assess the population impact of antiretroviral therapy (ART) use on mortality and HIV incidence. We describe the key parameters that determine the impac...

Authors: Rebecca F Baggaley, Neil M Ferguson and Geoff P Garnett

Assessing observational studies of medical treatments

Previous studies have assessed the validity of the observational study design by comparing results of studies using this design to results from randomized controlled trials. The present study examined design f...

Authors: Arthur Hartz, Suzanne Bentler, Mary Charlton, Douglas Lanska, Yogita Butani, G Mustafa Soomro and Kjell Benson

Assessing influenza-related mortality: Comment on Zucs et al.

Authors: Jonathan Dushoff

Influenza associated excess mortality in Germany, 1985 – 2001

Influenza-associated excess mortality is widely used to assess the severity of influenza epidemics. In Germany, however, it is not yet established as a routine component of influenza surveillance. We therefore...

Authors: Phillip Zucs, Udo Buchholz, Walter Haas and Helmut Uphoff

Epidemiologic measures and policy formulation: lessons from potential outcomes

This paper provides a critique of the common practice in the health-policy literature of focusing on hypothetical outcome removal at the expense of intervention analysis. The paper begins with an introduction ...

Authors: Sander Greenland

Are social causes so different from all other causes? A comment on Sander Greenland

Authors: Ezra Susser and Sharon Schwartz

Epidemiologists and causation in an intricate world

Authors: Mauricio L Barreto

Author's response to comments on "Epidemiologic Measures and Policy Formulation"

Authors: Sander Greenland

Dengue fever: new paradigms for a changing epidemiology

Dengue is the most important arthropod-borne viral disease of public health significance. Compared with nine reporting countries in the 1950s, today the geographic distribution includes more than 100 countries...

Authors: Debarati Guha-Sapir and Barbara Schimmer

Conflict and HIV: A framework for risk assessment to prevent HIV in conflict-affected settings in Africa

In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS and violent conflict interact to shape population health and development in dramatic ways. HIV/AIDS can create conditions conducive to conflict. Conflict can affect the epidemio...

Authors: Nancy B Mock, Sambe Duale, Lisanne F Brown, Ellen Mathys, Heather C O'Maonaigh, Nina KL Abul-Husn and Sterling Elliott