Hurricane preparation – A grocery guide for city folk

As I’m sure you’ve heard, there’s a hurricane moving up the eastern coast of North America. Being in the path of the storm, I thought I should stock up on a some food and water, but I wasn’t quite sure what to get. Looking on the web turned out to be not much help – all the advice seemed to assume that if the power went out, I’d have easy access to a grill, a BBQ, or at least a camp stove. Unfortunately those things need a yard or a balcony, and if you live in the city like me, affording those is a bit of a pipe-dream. So what’s a city girl to do?

Statistics in the Real World: Making the best of a bad (data) situation

One of the first things I realized when I started doing statistical analysis for real research projects, instead of in the classroom, was how messy and unconventional real data sets can be. I’ve talked about this before in the context of power analysis , but it gets much worse.

An experiment in eating right

Since I found out that I’ll be moving 3000 miles to a new country for grad school, I’ve been trying to take the opportunity to overhaul my life from decluttering and digitizing, to exercising and eating right.

Let’s try that again..

Well, it’s been a long time since I last posted anything but I’m starting a doctoral program in a month, and I think that this is a good time to make some life changes. Starting with blogging more regularly. I’m going to aim for once a week at least and see how that goes.

Wish me luck

The Importance of Being Earnest… about Vaccines

I am pro-vaccination: both in theory and in practice. I myself have had just about every vaccine that a person can, as a result of a rather esoteric travel history. If I have children, I intend to vaccinate them with every recommended vaccine, on the recommended schedule. I believe this is an important thing for a parent to do, both in terms of protecting one’s own child, and also as part of (what I believe to be) one’s civic duty to protect other people’s children.

I know this is a highly contentious topic for many people. I don’t pretend to be an expert on vaccines, and I’m certainly not a virologist, but I do have training and experience in interpreting biological and epidemiological data about infectious disease.

So with those caveats, I’d like to discuss importance of measles vaccination and the real life life and death consequences of vaccine refusal.

Dispatches from a disaster: Infectious disease in Haiti

This past week, ProMED-mail alerted it’s readers to a useful resource for any medical personnel on the ground in Haiti.

GIDEON-Online has an e-book describing all the infectious diseases in Haiti, which it is providing free for download to anyone working to provide disaster relief or medical care in Haiti.

If that’s you, and you haven’t seen this book yet, go check it out: here.

Dispatches from an outbreak: Anthrax in heroin

As of February 10th, 11 people have died in the UK (mostly Scotland) and Germany due to anthrax-contaminated heroin. Overall, 22 people have been sickened; a 50% case-fatality rate.

Snapshot of Public Health – Youth in America

This week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) there was a “QuickStats” article on the prevalence of functional difficulties in children aged 5-17 in the US from 2001-2007 using National Health Interview Survey data.

The QuickStats article also links to a full report on functional difficulties and related health care and educational services usage among American children. I’ll summarize both after the jump.

Research at Work – Statistics in the “Real” World

I have a confession: I find statistics fascinating. If you tell me something about the world, my first question is “how do you know?” And if you have some stats to back it up, I’m so much more likely to listen.

That said, I’m beginning to find that every time I need to actually use statistics in my research, the statistical tools that I’m equipped with never seem to be right for the task.

For instance, recently boss wanted to know how much statistical power we had to detect a given effect size with this fixed sample size. Easy enough, you say (well, if you’re a statistician or epidemiologist, at least): just look up the formula, plug in your numbers and you’re good to go.

Well… of course, in the “real” world, it’s never that simple.

Adverse Events and Swine Flu

The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) of the US Department of Health and Human Services has released a summary of adverse events reported following immunization with the Swine flu/H1N1 vaccine. An adverse event is basically any medical symptom that is reported after receiving a medical treatment – in this case, the Swine flu/H1N1 vaccine.

94% of the adverse events reported to VAERS by Jan 8 2010 were not considered serious – symptoms like soreness or redness at injection site.

Out of 110 million doses that were shipped to providers, 33 deaths were reported. There is currently no evidence to suggest that these deaths were caused by the vaccine, but the CDC, the FDA and applicable State governments are currently investigating each of these cases.

There were also 46 reports of Guillan-Barre syndrome, which is less than the average weekly number of diagnoses of Guillan-Barre syndrome among all Americans – whether or not they had received any influenza vaccine.