International health and aid policies: urgent cure needed!

Blog Post by Jean-Pierre Unger, physician, professor of public health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium

Red carpets were put away. The MDG midnight mass ended over renewed, solemn commitments. But the by now near failure of the MDGs in health can be read as the chronicle of a death foretold, a failure especially manifest in a region, where international aid is most active – in Sub-Saharan Africa. 10 million are victims of communicable diseases vulnerable to simple drugs such as malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, diarrhoea. These victims die because they lack access to quality, affordable health care.

The Evolution of Disease in a Rapidly Changing World

Joy Henry is a blogger for An Apple A Day and a writer specializing in online nursing degrees for Guide to Healthcare Schools.

As humans evolve and the world they live in changes, the types and prevalence of disease they get changes as well. And while both environment and genes can be responsible for different diseases, a new study is shedding light on the crossroads between them. New research out of Stanford Medical School shows that as humans’ environments change quickly and drastically (which often happens), genes can become selected which simultaneously make them more fit and more susceptible to a certain disease. The old Darwinian mantra of positive benefit, positive selection becomes complicated when environment changes at an unprecedented pace.

Statistical Modeling for Biomedical Researchers – online resources and class notes

Blog Post by William D. Dupont, PhD, Professor of Biostatistics and Preventive Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

I teach a course in intermediate-level biostatistics as part of the Master of Public Health program at Vanderbilt University.  This program is targeted at clinical fellows who are interested in academic careers in population-based medicine.  Class notes for this course are posted at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/BiostatisticsTwoClassPage in both pdf and MS-PowerPoint formats.  This web site also contains the data files used in this course and log files illustrating the analyses performed in the lecture notes.  These notes are based on my text: Statistical Modeling for Biomedical Researchers.  The goal of both this text and these notes is to provide hands-on instruction in modern multi-variable statistical analysis while using a minimum of mathematics.  My web page for this text may be found at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/dupontwd/wddtext/. 

The politics of science: Peer review

Blog Post by Dr. S Nassir Ghaemi, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts

“In my journal, anyone can make a fool of himself.”  (Rudolph Virchow)

Perhaps the most important thing to know about scientific publication is that the “best” scientific journals do not publish the most important articles.  This will be surprising to some readers, and probably annoying to others (often editorial members of prestigious journals).  I could be wrong; this statement reflects my personal experience and my reading of the history of medicine, but if I am correct, the implication for the average clinician is important:  it will not be enough to read the largest and most famous journals.  For new ideas, one must look elsewhere.