Epidemiologists, Disease Detecting, and Media Literacy
From time to time a small outbreak of an uncommon disease occurs — often in an unexpected location. Sometimes it’s publicized and we hear about it, but at other times the outbreak is small enough that most people only hear after the fact. Either way, many of our elderly parents, and many of us, find out about these outbreaks while watching television, and the news reports are often hyped and scary. All of us need to develop the skill to seek more information and figure out what is left out of a news report.
Click here to learn about a career in epidemiology.
Rarely do such short television news stories explain the extraordinary successes of disease detection and disease detectives — how they collect facts, put them together, and puzzle out possible answers. The people in charge of this process are epidemiologists, scientists, sometimes but not always physicians, who explore the way a disease moves from place to place and how it might be controlled.
Legionella bacteria from the National Library of Medicine image gallery.
In January, many of us heard, mostly on TV and radio but also via print and Internet sources, how a small outbreak (eight cases) of Legionnaires’ disease occurred at a hospital in Wisconsin within a short period of time. We heard about this outbreak, which occurred in 2010, because of a journal article, An Outbreak of Legionnaires Disease Associated with a Decorative Water Wall Fountain in a Hospital published in the February 2012 issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. Read more »
Becoming A Grown-up Child
One day in April 2007 my husband and I were the adult kids in our families — we are the only adult children
— and the next day we became what we laughingly call “real grown-ups,” helping first one, then two, and increasingly all three of our parents. It’s time to give back, and we do so willingly and happily. However the process is not easy, and it is not free from anxiety and tension. Check out the As Our Parents Age About page to learn more about the mission of this blog.
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As Our Parents Age by Marti Weston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on work at AsOurParentsAge.wordpress.com and AsOurParentsAge.net
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing As Our Parents Age. To learn more about this blog go to the AsYourParentsAge About page.
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