Who Is A Disease Detective?
Imagine that you are in a time machine and transported back to 1848 London. Every newspaper you pick up talks about the many deaths caused by cholera. Hospitals are overflowing with patients with many similar symptoms- diarrhea, vomiting, cramps, and dehydration. “A cholera epidemic”, says the nurse to a passerby… “Wonder what’s causing this”, she whispers.
Anepidemic, you wonder…. Does it mean that too many people are getting sick with the same disease? Yes, an outbreak or an epidemic is an unexpected spike in the number of people diagnosed with the same health condition. Often they are localized to a specific region like a town, city or county.
Tracking the nasty bacteria..
Courtesy Wikipedia
Remember you are back in 1854 when it was not known what caused diseases! They needed a disease detective, a sleuth just like Sherlock Holmes, but to solve the mystery of the epidemic.
Enter John Snow, a physician with a detective’s curiosity. He started collecting data on WHO were affected and WHERE they were seeing the most cases of the cholera. He mapped this data out and started analyzing it to see if he could find a pattern. The most popular theory about cholera at that time was that “miasma” or some strange bad air spreads it. But the data collected by Mr. Snow did not quite fit this theory. The wind patterns in London would have spread the disease to locations not recording the epidemic! There had to be some other phenomenon…
Looking at the map of the cases of cholera and deaths in a part of London, a pattern was evident. The cases of cholera seemed to be associated with the water pump from which people got their water. Specifically, the pump from one water company that got its water from a particularly dirty stretch of the Thames River! And it was dirty because there were no well-constructed sewers in London at that time. Removing that suspected water pump in the city led to a drop in the cholera cases!
A new field of study
That was the birth of a new branch of study called epidemiology, and John Snow was the first disease sleuth, or epidemiologist! An epidemic is a disease that spreads quickly and affects lots of people. Epidemiology is the study of diseases and an epidemiologist is a person that studies epidemics. This works with lots of words like society, sociology is the study of society, and a sociologist is someone that studies society. Several years later, the bacterium responsible for cholera was discovered.
Since then, epidemiology, as a field of study, has become more and more specialized -- neuroepidemiology, cardiovascular epidemiology, cancer epidemiology, or infectious disease epidemiology depending on which epidemic they are investigating. Infectious disease epidemiologists from CDC (Center for Disease Control, a branch of the US Government) study the patterns and trends of emerging infectious diseases such as such as, H1N1, hepatitis C, hanta virus, and listeria.
Just last week, a small outbreak of norovirus in members of a girls soccer team in Oregon was tracked by epidemiologists to a reusable grocery bag. The owner who was suffering from a viral infection had kept the unused bags in the bathroom, prior to the outbreak. Noroviruses can cause severe diarrhea and vomiting.
Next time you see warnings such as “This product contains chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defectsor other reproductive harm” at gas stations or, warnings about childhood obesity and exercise, just know that epidemiological studies are the basis for such warnings.
Questions:
1. What is an epidemic?
2. What is epidemiology?
3. What is the job of an epidemiologist? Is it important?
4. Give an example of a recent discovery made by an epidemiologist.
5. Use the word zoo and add the suffixes ology, ologist, and logic to the end of it. How does this change the word? This works on hundreds of words.