Just Finished Reading: Epidemiology – A Very Short Introduction by Rodolfo Saracci (FP: 2010)

 

After the previous book on Pandemics I thought it would be good to look at the human response to epidemics and disease in general. This was indeed a very good complimentary read to the previous two books. Over just 126 pages the author looks at the science of disease control starting with the actual measurement of health and disease. After all if you can’t accurately measure something there’s no way to know if anything you’re doing to combat it is having any effect. Measurements give you data to work with which should allow you to zero in on the vectors that gave rise to the disease in the first place – they might show you were the first cases arose or they might show disease clusters or even the fabled patient zero themselves! Once the data has been collected and analysed it should give an idea of the cause of the disease (contaminated drinking water for instance) and allow treatment – or at the very least isolation of the affected area or population. Follow up data can also show the effects of any procedure undertaken to combat or mitigate the effects of the disease – such as handwashing after assisting in childbirth before moving onto the next patient (a process hotly debated before becoming common practice).

All of the above allows the tracking of disease within a population over time and, even without an effective cure, increases the possibility of controlling the spread and reducing any potential negative effects. Even without knowing much about the actual disease organism – bacteria, virus, parasite, fungus – epidemiological study can still highly inform effect procedures to combat its effects. Detailed analysis of the disease itself can come later (hopefully) and will undoubtedly help in devising better protective protocols but a good level of epidemiological data crunching can take you a long way even before you know what you’re fighting.

As I said earlier this was a nice complimentary volume to the previous pair and takes discussion of infectious diseases and pandemics to the next (higher) level and I’d recommend reading all three books as a set. Only one more in this particular ‘blitz’ to go just taking it one more level up in scale. Then we’ll get back to normal programming – or at least as ‘normal’ as it gets around here.