Anti-vaxxers are spreading a new rumor, and so, here I am, screaming in the wilderness to see if anyone is paying attention. The new rumor is — as you may have guessed from my clever title to this blog post — that vaccines cause autism SIDS. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is a syndrome in which an infant dies suddenly…
With a relentless homicide epidemic ongoing, Baltimore still finds time to celebrate their football team. With so many issues around the world, we still like — and need — to be entertained.
There is a great podcast by economist Tim Harford about things that have gone terribly wrong and what we can learn from them. The podcast is called “Cautionary Tales,” and, believe me, they are. If you’re the kind of person who learns from their mistakes and the mistakes of others, you’ll like this podcast. Two of the recent stories really…
Baby Ren is now full-fledged Toddler Ren. As such, she has started to question my authority. This is very common among Rens, and your mileage may vary. The word “No” has become a very prominent part of her vernacular, and it is pretty much the default answer to many of our requests. Still, with our adult brains being a little…
A quick explainer of how you can calculate exposure time between cases and contacts using R programming.
Time flies, and you all of a sudden find yourself not thinking or acting the way that you used to. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Tell you all about it? Totally.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, so why not entertain you with a thrilling subject? Pop quiz: If you’re presenting the results of an analysis, do you present the odds ratio or the marginal effects? Let’s say you have 150 birth records, and you want to see if smoking is associated with premature births. You create a two-by-two…
It’s late February, 2000. I’m just a few months away from graduating college and finally leaving that place. I’ve been mindful of what I do because I don’t want to get into trouble. I’m driving around with a fake insurance card in my crappy car, so I don’t go over the speed limit and I heed all the traffic signs.…
In the last two blog posts (here and here), I told you about the history of fluoridation of water in the United States and other parts of the world. I told you how a dentist traveled out west to Colorado and, through observation and laboratory study, helped determine that adding fluoride to drinking water prevented tooth decay. Of course, the…
In case you haven’t heard, public health authorities in the United States caught on to a weird kind of lung damage syndrome that is strongly associated with vaping (aka “electronic cigarettes”). The syndrome manifests itself as lung damage that is acute and severe, leaving young people with lungs that work at the capacity seen in octagenarians.
There are hundreds of cases and some deaths reported, and we are all working on understanding this phenomenon further and doing something about it.
Speaking of doing something about it, it seems that the federal government is mulling a ban on electronic cigarettes. Some states and local governments have already done it, and it’s making people stock up on their supplies before it happens. So that is likely where this is going… While parents want to protect their kids from damaging their lungs permanently, and while sentiment on smoking is definitely not in its favor, we are probably going to have a nationwide ban on vaping products that are flavored, at the very least.
Personally, I am not in favor of a ban because bans create black markets for these products, making them harder to regulate and assure their safety. In my opinion, it is better to tax them into oblivion, allowing only those with the means to pay through the nose to pay for a safer product. We’ll see how it goes.
