Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2008; all rights reserved.
Response: The distribution and determinants of epidemiologic research
Centre for Public Health Research, Massey University Wellington Campus, Private Box 756, Wellington, New Zealand.
E-mail: n.e.pearce@massey.ac.nz
Accepted 27 November 2007
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Epidemiology is commonly defined as the study of ‘the distribution and determinants of disease in human populations’. Thus, epidemiology is inherently focused on populations, and epidemiologists recognize that anecdotes about individuals cannot be used to refute evidence about populations. For example, an anecdote about someone who smoked one pack a day and lived to be 100, or someone who never smoked and developed lung cancer anyway, does not refute the evidence that people who smoke a pack a day get lung cancer at 10 times the rate of non-smokers. Similarly, anecdotes about individual epidemiologists acting ethically or unethically do not confirm or refute evidence about general tendencies.
In my commentary about corporate influences on epidemiology,1 I was not intending to comment on specific individuals (with the occasional exception of extreme cases which are too blatant to ignore), but rather to comment on the distribution and determinants of epidemiologic research, particularly
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  N. Pearce Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology. Kabat GC. Int. J. Epidemiol., September 18, 2008; (2008) dyn198v1. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|