Keynotes

1.     Old epidemiologists never die... they just get very retrospective.

2.     Epidemiologists... are variable lovers.

3.     "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." Mark Twain from Life on the Mississippi

4.     Old epidemiologists never die... they just lose their external validity.

5.     THE FOUR PREMISES OF PUBLIC HEALTH

·         The philosophy of public health and social justice.

·         The primary goal of public health is to reduce or eliminate differences in mortality and morbidity between populations.

·         The science on which public health decisions are based is epidemiology, or the study of the distribution of diseases, health problems, or risk factors in the population and action taken to alleviate those problems. The science of demography augments epidemiology and studying population problems.

William Foege

6.     Old epidemiologists never die... they just become totally confounded.

7.     "Infant Mortality is the most sensitive index we possess of social welfare and sanitary administration." From A. Newsholme, London, 1910

8.     Epidemiology is more than skin deep.

9.     Goya Turns Lead Poisoning to Good Account: in 1792, Goya experienced a sudden overwhelming assault on his nervous system. He suffered from dizziness, mental confusion, impaired hearing and speech, tinnitus, and partial blindness. He had been in daily contact with the toxic lead compound, sometimes grinding it, and inhaling its fumes. Ramazzini had observed that painters suffer from palsy of the limbs, cachexia, blackened teeth, unhealthy complexions, melancholia, and the loss of the sense of smell. He traced the cause to the red and white lead and mercury in cinnabar. Goya's palette also included toxic lead chromate and mercury-based pigments. After many months, Goya recovered, and a new Goya emerged. After the time of his illness, he painted charming portraits and the pastoral scenes. Now the quote ‘humane and better social observer, the scorching and despairing delineate her of ice and cruelty’ took over."  Reproduced with permission of McGraw-Hill, Inc., from The Illustrated Treasury of Medical Curiosa by Art Newman, copyright 1988

10.  Old epidemiologists never die... they just suffer from and age effect.

11.  Research Doublespeak: "More research is necessary to clarify these results" means "What does it all mean?" - Contributed by David Lawrence

12.  A Lesson in Epidemiology from Casanova:  Surgeon: I have made a good deal of money, and it is to you, Captain-God bless you!- That I am indebted for my personal comforts. Captain: How so?   Surgeon: In this way, Captain. You had a connection with Don Jerome's housekeeper, and he left her. When you went away with a certain souvenir which she communicated to a certain friend of hers, who, in perfect good faith, made a present to his wife. This lady did not wish, I suppose to be selfish and the gave her souvenir to a libertine, who in turn was so generous with it, that within less than a month, I had about fifty clients.”  Reproduced with permission of McGraw-Hill Inc. from The Illustrated Treasury of Medical Curiosa by Art Newman, Copyright 1988

13.  Epidemiologists... prefer close associations.

14.  "Looking back now on the long path my life has followed, on the lives of my peers and colleagues, and on the briefer ones of the young recruits who have worked with us, I have become persuaded that, in scientific research, neither the degree of one's intelligence nor the ability to carry one's tasks with thoroughness and precision are factors essential to personal success and fulfillment. More important for the attaining of both ends are total dedication and the tendency to underestimate difficulties, which cause one to tackle problems that other, more critical and acute persons instead opt to avoid." R. Levi-Montalcini, In Praise of Imperfection - Contributed by James Marks

15.  Nobody outmatches an epidemiologist!

16.  "The crucial issue is the knowledge-based health system. The mission of NEBT is to mobilize resources to generate relevant or essential knowledge to be used in policy formulation, planning, implementation, and evaluation of health systems." Prawase Wasi, Chairman, National Epidemiology Board of Thailand (NEBT)

17.  This song was apparently sung after the annual dinner of the Australian and New Zealand equivalent to the Society for Social Medicine. One would need several ’pints’ on board to fit into Grainger's music. (Tune: "English Country Garden," Grainger)

We are epidemiologists, and what do we measure?

Age, Sex, Race and Social Class

Mortality, morbidity at home, work, and leisure

by sex, race and social class

What is Social Class, you say?

How much school, or how much pay -

or where you live, where you work or where you play,

or what others say you are, and what you are you will STAY

with your Age, Sex, Race and Social Class.

We are epidemiologists, we study populations

and their health-related states and the prevalence.

We register and classify, recount the health events

and we calculate their incidence.

"X-bar," "s," "t," we analyze, rates and risks we standardize,

over R-squared and Chi-squared and "p" we agonize,

and we seriously consider "alpha," "beta," sample size

and statistical results in the light of common sense.

We are epidemiologists, we come before commissions

to support each health initiative throughout the commonwealth.

We write papers for enquiries, and compile detailed submissions

to apply for project funds, and to study Public Health -

Risk factors- fats and smoke and son,

Case-controls are properly done

prospective cohort studies, any other way we can -

We are bold and we’re determined to woman and a man

to improve the nation's health, in the open or BY STEALTH.

We are epidemiologists, the huge data-sets we get

in these modern times we computerize.

Multivariate techniques are the norms that we set

as we model our hypotheses, and then analyze.

"Hardware first" - the cry is clear,

then "Software, user-friendly, please"

Mainframes and Networks and Modems and PC’s - 

but "Garbage in Garbage out" is the phrase we all fear

as we struggle with statistics, seeking HEALTH as the prize.

REPEAT FIRST STANZA

18.  IEA Anthem (or "Epidemiology Together") tune: "An English Old Country Garden," Granger              

How many variables keep us in the job?

Age, Sex, Race and Social Class.

How do they try to break us down?

Age, Sex, Race and Social Class.

Multiple Regre -e –ssion

Chi- Square, correlation

P less than .001-

Unbiased and uncontrolled, no deviation here

We will not be compounded or broken down.

How many ladders can we climb?

MB, MS, PhD

To what heights can be aspire?

Chairman, Dean, Vice Chancellor.

Academic masturbation,

intellectual flagellation

these are among the games we play –

Theories and hypotheses, and learned

papers we produce

All on Age, Sex, Race and Social Class

19.  The Mystery Deepens: NOTE:  We thought it was a little strange that these two songs were so much alike. We wrote to several people involved with IEA and with the Australasian Epidemiology Association to confirm that it did exist, and no one had heard of the song! Here are few excerpts from a letter return to us by one of our New Zealand informants:

            "... I can't find anyone who knows of the song, or have signed it. However, I'm not sure if anyone    would admit to it if they had. They would also seem to be a problem with recall bias and that anyone who was drunk enough to sing the song would probably be too drunk to remember doing  so... my own feeling is that the AEA probably stole (sorry, adapted) the song from the IEA. It is unlikely that anyone over here would've written it, since it contains complicated terms such as  "alpha and beta". Actually, I have attended the last two IEA meetings and I'm sure that we didn't    sing anything there either..."

20.  "Men die of the diseases which they have studied most... it's as if the morbid condition was an evil creature which, when it found itself closely hunted, flew at the throat of its pursuer." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from Round the Red Lamp, "the Surgeon Talks"

21.  EXCITE AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST… cause an effect.

22.  : "I'm on a Committee" (sung to the tune of Suite Little Buttercup" in H.M.S. Pinafore)

            Oh give me your pity!

            I'm on a committee,

            which means that from morning to night

 

            We attend and amend,

            And contend and defend          

            Without a conclusion in sight.

 

            We confer and concur,

            We defer and demur

            And reiterate all of our thoughts.

 

            We revise the agenda

            With frequent addenda

            And consider a load of reports

 

            We compose and propose,

            We suppose and oppose

            And the points of procedure are fun;

 

            But though various notions

            Are brought up as motions

            There's terribly little gets done.

 

            We resolve and absolve

            But we never dissolve,

            Since it's out of the question for us

 

            To bring our committee

            To end like this ditty

            Which stops with a period - thus.

Leslie Lipson

23.  Epidemiologists... prefer causal relationships.

24.  If you have the TIME and PLACE, I'm the PERSON.

25.  A Bit of Poetry: Death is all too familiar to the epidemiologist who studies it primarily as an abstract quantitative concept. Occasionally, death announces its presence closer to home, when a friend, colleague, or family member passes away. Just such an event - the death of Dr. Ralph Patrick, a professor of epidemiology at UNC/Chapel Hill - created the right combination of whatever it takes to put together the following poem, published in The Pharos 1986; 49:43.

Lament for an Epidemiologist

We both wondered

just how science progresses

in the scheme of things

Occasional conversation

heaped with unbridled conjecture

and a few externa laced with experience

I sat, barely listening

always questioning

offering hope without proof

and guesses against experience

He sat, always listening

answering problems with others

and those with their begotten

It's evolution, he'd say

(with a twinkle in his eye)

And now he's gone

but the flame is kindled,

‘tis the scheme of things.

Douglas Weed

26.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they are just less likely to respond.

27.  Got no time for wild polemics - I'm hung up on epidemics.

28.  "Our main business of life is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." - Thomas Carlyle (a favorite quote of Sir William Ostler)

29.  On the Link between Ale and Epidemiology: "... There is a brewery in Broad Street, near to the pump, and on perceiving that no brewer’s men were registered as having died of cholera, I called on Mr. Huggins, the proprietor. He informed me that they were above seventy workmen employed in the brewery, and that none of them have suffered from cholera - at least in a severe form - only two having been indisposed, and that not seriously, at the time the disease prevailed. The men were allowed a certain amount of malt liquor, and Mr. Huggins believes they do not drink water at all; and he is quite certain that the workmen never obtain water from the pump in the street. There is a deep well in the brewery, in addition to the New River water..."

            Snow on Cholera, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1949

30.  Old  Epidemiologists Never Die... they just fulfill their life expectancy.

31.  "When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot - your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." - Lord Kelvin

32.  "Of all cooperative enterprises, public health is the most important and gives the greatest returns." William J. Mayo, 1919

33.  "Living is not the good, but living well. The wise man therefore lives as long as he should, not as long as he can. He will observe where he is to live, with whom, how, and what he is to do. He will always think of life in terms of quality, not quantity." - Seneca

34.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... their data just get soft.

35.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they just don't count anymore.

36.  Research Doublespeak: "These results will be reported at a later date" means "I might get around to this sometime" - contributed by David Lawrence

37.  It takes on significance... with an epidemiologist.

38.  Epidemiologists... make better cohorts.

39.  Epidemiologists do it... all the TIME EVERYWHERE with EVERYBODY.

40.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they just assume new configurations.

41.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they just reach infinite significance.

42.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they simply cross-over.

43.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... it's an epidemiologic fallacy.

44.  WHOWHATWHENWHEREWHYHOW spells Epidemiology!

45.  Research Doublespeak: "The results were significant using Doublespeak’s Correction to this contest" means "Everything looked random using conventional tests" - contributed by David Lawrence

46.  Diseases of Learned Men - Excerpts from Diseases of Tradesmen, 1700

            Bernardo Ramazzini is arguably the father of occupational medicine and therefore the grandfather of occupational epidemiology. His book Diseases of Tradesman published in 1700 feature descriptions of illnesses associated with particular occupations. Of course, epidemiologists were not included, but "learned men" - professors, doctors, and the mathematicians - were represented, and, in Ramazzini’s mind, subject to a variety of maladies.  Many of today's epidemiologists fall into one of these three categories. Here are a few quotes:

            Professors: "... all through the winter and spring they lecture from their platforms till they are hoarse, trying to instruct young students, and at the end of the season they demonstrate by their uneasy and asthmatic condition what serious ailments of the chest can be caused by such a strain on the voice."

             Doctors: "Doctors, however, fare much better; they are not attacked by so many diseases, and when they do fall ill, they set it down to running about so much and not to a sedentary life or too much standing... This I could not ascribe to any particular precautions on their part, but rather to their taking a good deal of exercise and to their cheerful frame of mind when they go home with their pockets full of fees."

            Mathematicians (Statisticians): "Mathematicians have to ponder and demonstrate the most abstruse problems far removed from material existence, and to this end the mind must be kept detached from the senses and have hardly any dealings with the body; hence they are nearly all dull, listless, lethargic, and never quite at home in the ordinary affairs of men."

47.  "One of the problems with doing observational research on humans, rather than a controlled trial, is that you don't always come up with the same answers,... I'm old enough not to trust any single study, not even my own." - George Comstock, New York Times, November 18, 1990

48.  Research Doublespeak: "One possible explanation for the test results is..." means "I had to think a long time to come up with even one." - contributed by David Lawrence

49.  "We are always dealing with dirty data. The trick is to do it with a clean mind." - Michael Gregg

50.  Cancer Causes Epidemiology

51.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they just redefine their parameters.

52.  Epidemiologists...rate!

53.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they just add to the sum of squares.

54.  Research Doublespeak: "Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study" means "The results on the others didn't make sense and were ignored" - contributed by David Lawrence

55.  On Collective Terms... "A group of epidemiologists? How about a term in honor of our past - a flurry of epidemiologists. The honor, of course, would be to Dr. Snow. A larger group would of course be a ’blizzard’ and a small group would just be a couple of ‘flakes’. - James W. Justice, M.D.

56.  Epidemiologists... know all the methods

57.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they’re afraid it causes bladder cancer

58.  "It is more important to be doing the right things than to be doing things right." - Peter Drucker

59.  Epi Haiku:

            Natural causes out of vogue

            Smoke or Salt or Sloth

            Have grave results.

                        - Contributed by Dan Cherkin

60.  Research Doublespeak: "Typical results are shown" means "The best results are shown"                             - contributed by David Lawrence

61.  Epidemiologists... avoids spurious relationships.

62.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die... they can't agree on a cause of death.

63.  Research Doublespeak: ""While it is not impossible to provide definite answers to these questions" means "The experiment didn't work out, but I figured I could get publicity out of it." - contributed by David Lawrence

64.  Epidemiologists... are well-adjusted

65.  "The only way to keep your health is eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain

66.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they have herd immunity.

67.  Epidemiologists... do it without bias.

68.                                            Epi’s Answers

                                                            Epi’s claim

                                                            To lasting fame

                                                            Will come with

                                                            Answers gained

                                                            Ethically

                                                            Not with Stealth

                                                            Answers for

                                                            Prevention, cure

                                                            And lasting Health

                                                                              - B Ladene Larsen

69.  Epidemiologists... always need analysis.

70.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they’re just under-reported

71.  Respond... to an Epidemiologist.

72.  Epidemiologists... do it with informed consent (confidentiality guaranteed).

73.  "The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference." - William Farr

74.  Nobody outmatches my dad the epidemiologist!

75.  No one counts like my wife the epidemiologist!

76.  Tell me your attributes and I'll tell you your chances.

77.  Get your case under control with an epidemiologist.

78.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die…they just reach their confidence limits.

79.  "The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices." H.L. Mencken

80.  Epidemiologists... make a significant difference.

81.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just get tired of hearing AIDS.

82.  Research Doublespeak: "It is generally believed that..." means "A couple of other guys think so too". - contributed by David Lawrence

83.  "The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend." - Benjamin Disraeli

84.  "Hunches and intuitive impressions are essential for getting the work started, but it is only through the quality of the numbers at the end that the truth can be told." - Lewis Thomas, Biostatistics and Medicine

85.  Epidemiologists...Count!

86.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just plot new peaks.

87.  Research Doublespeak: "Of great theoretical and practical importance" means "It is interesting to me."

88.  Epidemiologists... do it with reliability.

89.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just ride off into the subset.

90.  "What gets measured gets done." - Mason Haire, In Search of Excellence

91.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just risk being relatively odd.

92.  Epidemiologists… do it with populations.

93.  "It is a truth certain that when it is not in our power to determine what is true we ought to follow what is most probable." - Descartes

94.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die… it's too risky.

95.  Old Epidemiologists Never Die…they just reinterpret temporal relationships.

96.  Epidemiologists need infection too!

97.  Epidemiologists… do it randomly.

98.  Epi Haiku:

            p.i. slain by sharp rebuke

            death certificate reads,

            "Grants Funds Denied."

                                    Dan Cherkin

99.  Epidemiologists... do it with 95% confidence

100.        "What gets measured gets done." - Mason Haire, In Search of Excellence

101.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… until their names appear in 80 column obituaries.

102.        Research Doublespeak: "The most reliable values are those of Jones" means "He was a student of mine" - contributed by David Lawrence

103.        Epidemiologists... are matchmakers.

104.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just exceed the highest age stratum.

105.        "Some people are so sensitive they feel snubbed if an epidemic overlooks them." - Frank (Kin) Hubbard (1868-1930)

106.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just get ring around the cholera.

107.        "At the heart of the efforts to develop a code of ethics for epidemiologists is the need to determine our allegiances. Do these allegiances have priorities? To the truth? To the social welfare? To the employer? What is epidemiology all about?"  - Albert Jonsen, IEF Conference on Ethics in Epidemiology, 1989

108.        "The function of protecting and developing health must rank even above that of restoring it when it is impaired." - Hippocrates

109.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… but their responses are variable.

110.        "Of all the means of arriving at truth, the most simple, and at the same time the most certain, is abstract reasoning... (and) there is one class of subjects which forms, in a more especial manner, the province of abstract reasoning. I mean number – magnitude - quantity." - William A. Guy, 1839

111.        "... epidemiology is essentially an inductive science, concerned not merely with describing the distribution of disease, but equally or more with fitting it into a consistent philosophy." - Wade Hampton Frost, 1920’s

112.        "Statistics are curious things. They afford one of the few examples in which the use, or abuse, of mathematical methods tends to induce a strong emotional reaction in non-mathematical minds. This is because statisticians apply, to problems in which we are interested, a technique which we do not understand. It is exasperating, when we have studied a problem by methods that we have spent laborious years mastering, to find our conclusions questioned, and perhaps refuted, by someone who could not have made the observations himself. It requires more equanimity than most of us possess to acknowledge that the fault is in ourselves." - Sir Austin Bradford Hill, Lancet, 1937

113.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they are just distributed randomly.

114.        "This seems to be one of the many cases in which the admitted accuracy of mathematical processes is allowed to throw a wholly inadmissible appearance of authority over the results obtained by them... As the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peascods, so pages of formulas will not get a different result out of loose data." – T.H. Huxley, 1869

115.        "Superior doctors prevent the disease,

            Mediocre doctors treat the disease before evident,

            Inferior doctors treat the full-blown disease.“ – Huang Dee Nai-Ching, (2600 BC, First Chinese      Medical Text)

116.        Research Doublespeak: "It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding..." means "I don't understand it" - contributed by David Lawrence

117.        Epidemiologists... have nice figures.

118.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just become lost to follow-up.

119.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just count less.

120.        Epidemiologists... have the odds.

121.        Research Doublespeak: ""Thanks are due to Joe Glotz for assistance with experiments and to John Doe for valuable discussion" means "Glotz did the work and Doe explained to me what it meant." - Contributed by David Lawrence

122.        Prevention: "It is quite obvious that the means and methods used in prevention of disease are those provided by medicine and science. And yet whether these methods are applied or not does not depend on medicine alone, but to a much higher extent on the philosophical and social tendencies at the time... From whatever angle we approach these problems, over and over we find that hygiene and public, like medicine at large, are but an aspect of the general civilization of the time and are largely determined by the cultural conditions of that time." – H.E. Sigerist, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1933

123.        Epidemiologists... do it for your health.

124.        Mench’s Laws:

·         The data you have are not the data you want

·         The data you want are not the data you need

·         The data you need are not the data you can get

125.        Epi Haiku:

            Love the, prophylactically

            means never having to say

            you are sorry

Dan Cherkin

126.        Epidemiologists... give group rates.

127.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… their data just get soft.

128.        Research Doublespeak: "Correct within an order of magnitude" means "Wrong" - contributed by David Lawrence

129.        Epidemiologists... look for meaningful relationships.

130.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just can't be traced.

131.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… their lives just get tabled.

132.        Epidemiologists... have interesting transmissions.

133.        The Nature of Probability: "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings his neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken." - Bertrand Russell

134.        Epidemiologists... love Snow jobs.

135.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… their case just loses control.

136.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… Anyway, that's how they interpret the data.

137.        "In writing this book, I have honestly tried to avoid the four grounds of human ignorance set forth long ago by Roger Bacon: trust in inadequate authority, the force of custom, the opinion of the inexperienced crowd, and hiding of one's own ignorance with the parading of a superficial wisdom." - Ethel Dunham Premature Infants, A Manual for Physicians

138.        Epidemiology... is a risky business.

139.        Epidemiologists... leave nothing to chance.

140.        Research Duoblespeak: “It might be argued that..." means "I have such a good answer for this objection that I shall raise it." - contributed by David Lawrence

141.        "Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who are hungry and not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone, it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, hopes of its children." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

142.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they're just broken down by age and sex.

143.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just leave their cohorts behind.

144.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just fail their goodness of fit.

145.        Epidemiologists... do it with increased frequency.

146.        No, I am not a skin doctor!

147.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… their samples just get smaller.

148.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… can't find a job? That's why!

149.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just cause new effects.

150.        Epidemiologists... do in the field!

151.        Research Doublespeak: "It has long been known..." means "I haven't bothered to look up the original reference"  - contributed by David Lawrence

152.        "The best estimates are that the medical system (doctors, drugs, hospitals) affects about 10% of the usual indices for measuring health: whether you live at all (infant mortality), how well you live (days lost due to sickness), how long you live (adult mortality). The remaining 90% are determined by factors over which doctors have little or no control, from individual lifestyle (smoking, exercise, worry), to social conditions (income, eating habits, physiological inheritance), to the physical environment (air and water quality). Most of the bad things that happen people are at present beyond the reach of medicine." – A Waldovsky,  Daedalus, 1977

153.        Ride the downhill slope - with epidemiologists!

154.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… but they do tend to suffer from doze-response effects.

155.        Research Doublespeak: "It is believed that..." means "I think" - contributed by David Lawrence

156.        Epidemiologists... compare and save.

157.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just put their relatives at risk!

158.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just don't factor in the analysis.

159.        "All things are hidden, obscure and debatable if the cause of the phenomena be unknown, but everything is clear if this cause be known." – Louis Pasteur. The Germ Theory and Its Application to Medicine and Surgery, Ch. 2

160.        "A science does not truly become mature until it develops a predictive capability." – P. Medawar, The Limits of Science

161.        "The scientific purist, who will wait for medical statistics until they are and nosologically exact, is no wiser than Horace’s rustic waiting for the river to flow away." - Major Greenwood, Medical Statistics from Graunt to Farr, 1948

162.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they become step-wise.

163.        "If I were to compose an epitaph on medicine throughout the 20th century, it would read, ‘Brilliant in its discoveries, superb in its technological breakthroughs, but woefully inept in its application to those most in need...’ “ – Rex Fendall

164.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they are just no longer prevalent.

165.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just become insignificant.

166.        "Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors."     - Max Planck

167.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die…

            Old Epidemiologists Never Die…

            but perpetuate the title

            for tho they do no longer shed

            we study bout the life they led

            which keeps the butter on our bread

            and our statistics vital    Cheri Rolnick

168.        Frost follows Snow, in epidemiology

169.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… their effects just get modified.

170.        "The Government is very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases." - Sir Josiah Stamp, 1929

171.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just drop out.

172.        Sample an epidemiologist!

173.        Co-relate with an epidemiologist!

174.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just get lost in the field.

175.        "No cold statistic expresses more eloquently the difference between a society of sufficiency and a society of deprivation than infant mortality." - Kathleen Newland, World Watch Paper, 1981

176.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die…they just can't quite manage the logistics of life.

177.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die…they just rate lower.

178.        "Medical research must pass from the study of disease to that of health. The lesson of the Nineteenth Century, the greatest lesson of that century, is that the object of medical study is for the maintenance of health rather than the cure of the disease."  Franklin Paine Mall (in a letter to Abraham Flexner)

179.        Old Epidemiologists Never Die… they just do less than expected.

180.        "In the conduct of... inquiries... keep the great object of prevention constantly in view... because (it) is the ultimate aim of all investigations of this sort... preventive measures may be made a test of the truth of the theory itself." - William Budd, Investigation of Epidemic and Epizotic Diseases, 1864

181.        Dat-a Epidemiologist!

182.        "To stand in need of a medical art through sloth and intemperate diet... obliging the skillful sons of Asclepius to invent new names of diseases, such as dropsies and catarrhs - do you not think this abominable?" - Plato, The Republic