Author Archives
René F. Najera, DrPH
I'm a Doctor of Public Health, having studied at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
All opinions are my own and in no way represent anyone else or any of the organizations for which I work.
About History of Vaccines: I am the editor of the History of Vaccines site, a project of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Please read the About page on the site for more information.
About Epidemiological: I am the sole contributor to Epidemiological, my personal blog to discuss all sorts of issues. It also has an About page you should check out.
The Problem: I have an old radio that I want to refurbish and make into a streaming internet radio. Sure, I could just throw it away, but I’m not that wasteful. My uncles fixed radios and televisions, and they lost more and more work when electronics started getting cheap and […]
Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
I’m writing this on an Ubuntu Linux machine. The machine is a Raspberry Pi 4. I had heard about the Raspberry Pi machines a while ago, but I didn’t really get interested until recently. I’ve been picking up more and more little projects to do during downtime since the weather […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Six years ago, I told you all about how quarantines don’t really work in practice. They work in theory just fine, but human nature in all of us make us violate quarantine almost inevitably. We just don’t like being told what to do as a society. We also get scared […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
It’s almost three in the morning, and I’m driving toward Alice’s apartment. Part of me was tired over the adventure from a few hours ago, but the other side of me wanted to make sure that Alice got home safely. I assumed she was home because she was nowhere to […]
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
It’s 1992 and I’m a thirteen-year-old in high school. I don’t fit in with many of the groups in school because of my age and my background. I’m not smart enough to be part of the “nerds,” although I tend to earn good grades and get enrolled in advanced courses. […]
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
It’s a cold night in 1997, and I’m running down the streets in Juarez, Mexico. There is a group of young men ahead of me, four in total, who are themselves chasing after one other young man. One of the four is carrying a metal pipe of some sort. I’m […]
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
A friend of mine recently posted a neat picture of her husband and their children. In the photograph, her husband — who is a firefighter — is sitting on the back of a firetruck while their older child is on top of the truck, looking down at his dad. The […]
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
I’m trying harder than ever to lose weight and get healthy. I think I have it figured out. I just hope it’s not too late to reverse decades of damage done to my body by my addiction to food, my lifestyle, and the poor choices I’ve made.
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
“You know,” I said to my wife, “I think I’m going to buy that new MacBook.” We were driving down the road to go grab something to eat. It was the summer of 2012. I was still working at the Maryland Department of Health, but I was picking up more […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes