Anders Tegnell is chief epidemiologist with the Swedish Public Health Agency. Unlike many western countries whose health departments respond directly to elected ministers, Swedish law does not allow political intervention in agency decision making. This lack of ministerial rule seems to explain why evidence based pandemic plans were followed with minimal controversy in Sweden. Much … More Interviews Worth Hearing
Streptococcus pneumoniae (known as “pneumococcus“) is a bacteria that causes diseases such as middle ear infections, pneumonia, meningitis and septicaemia. It can cause fatal disease if not treated early enough with effective antibiotics. WHO estimate that around half a million lives are lost due to this bacteria each year. It is the leading cause of … More When Is a Pandemic No Longer a Pandemic?
Infant Breathing Breathing is a complicated physiological process that occurs differently in infants. The area in our brain that controls breathing is not fully developed in infants, who are at higher risk of suffocation, particularly during sleep. The phenomenon of infants dying in their sleep inexplicably, documented for thousands of years, has become known as … More When Cute Isn’t Cute
Wicked Problems A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems…… These problems can be mitigated through … More Solving Wicked Problems Despite Groupthinks
When I posted my Turning Tides blog two days ago it was distinctly American focused. My personal thoughts were that Australia did not appear to have any leadership able to help us through the ongoing mire of misinformation, confusion and division. Turns out that I was very wrong. Happily so! If you are an Australian … More Australia’s Turning Tide
The New York Times describe Scott Atlas as having “unorthodox” ideas, and “pushing a suite of disputed policy prescriptions” in this article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/us/politics/trump-scott-atlas-coronavirus.html#click=https://t.co/0jLWPfUQ7g. Yet for anyone who has read a little bit of public health and heard Atlas speak, this seems to be very far from the truth. Atlas recommends an evidence based public health … More Turning Tides
Politicians and the media have become our public health advisors and experts in 2020. This has been incredibly painful to watch. So much so that I have not looked at a newspaper or turned on the television in months. Public health appears to have folded to pressure from ill informed sources instead of following existing … More Fallacies and Fatality Rates
The Good: A Great Read Available at Taylor & Francis Online, “Critical Public Health is an international journal publishing innovative research into public health and health promotion, including health and policy issues“. According to Wikipedia “Critical Public Health is a quarterly peer-reviewed public health journal. It was established in 1979 as Radical Community Medicine, obtaining … More Face Mask Policies: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
More than 200 respiratory viruses are responsible for what is colloquially called “the common cold”. All of them are seasonal to some degree. Enveloped viruses (so called because they are surrounded by an envelope of lipid) peak in winter because the cold dry air provides an optimal environment for viral transmission. Heat, humidity and possibly … More Pandemic Proportions
Donald Henderson was an American Epidemiologist who led the World Health Organisation campaign that eradicated Smallpox. This was a highly infectious disease with airborne transmission (meaning fine particles that remain suspended in the air for significant periods of time after they’ve been coughed out) as well as other transmission routes. A comprehensive overview of the … More Evidence and Epicurves
