I was up far too late last night watching football, and our DSL was down during the crucial hours between work and Monday Night Football, so I couldn’t pre-write any blog posts. Which means you get sleep-deprived idle thoughts as blog posts this morning. I blame Verizon.<\/p>\n
So here’s a question about medicine, or rather the media coverage of medicine, that has been bugging me. In stories about the bird flu or whatever, you’ll frequently read statements of the form “We’re closer to having a worldwide pandemic than at any time since 1918.”<\/p>\n
My question is, in what sense is that true? That is, is the presence of a fatal-to-humans strain of avian influenza in some regions of Asia really a unique occurrance, or does it just seem particularly ominous because public health reporting has improved enough that we actually know about the situation in advance?<\/p>\n
It seems a little odd to think that there hasn’t been any time since 1918 when there was a potentially devastating bug lurking in a rural area somewhere, killing those unlucky enough to get it, but not quite making the jump to airborne transmission and getting out into the wider world. That seems like the sort of thing that probably happens more frequently than we know about, just because there are so many remote parts of the world where medical care is rare and disease tracking impossible. Lots of rural farmers could have died of mysterious diseases that could<\/strong> have become the Next Great Plague, but didn’t, and we’d never know.<\/p>\n So is the current scenario really a matter of a new and uniquely threatening bug, or is it a common bug and our knowledge<\/strong> of it is the new and unique thing? If a bird gets the flu in a forest, and no doctors are there to record it, is it a potential pandemic?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was up far too late last night watching football, and our DSL was down during the crucial hours between work and Monday Night Football, so I couldn’t pre-write any blog posts. Which means you get sleep-deprived idle thoughts as blog posts this morning. I blame Verizon. So here’s a question about medicine, or rather… Continue reading Ontological Epidemiology<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medicine","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}