Epidemiology

The study of people's health to determine the causes and effects of disease and health is known as epidemiology. Epidemiology is a subject covered by many people, especially the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This national public health institution has a Tracking Network here for people like you and me to access data and information about health and hazards in our environment from numerous sources. They have access to data on topics such as heart disease and cancer, toxic substances and climate change, and children's environmental health. It is very useful for research projects and papers about health conditions due to the environment or if you need to know what is prevalent in your neighborhood so you can take precautionary action. Today, I will be talking about asthma, since I suffer from difficult breathing and rarely need to use my inhaler.

If you visit the Tracking Network's website and scroll down until you see Asthma under Health Effects on the left-hand side, you will come to a description page about asthma. If you scroll down a little further on this page, you should see a box on the mid-right-hand side titled Search Data. Click on that and it will take you to this page where you can view the data you need. Here, you pick the conditions you want: I chose advanced, all mode, asthma content, asthma prevalence among adults, and percent of adults ever diagnosed with asthma since 2011 and onward, Ohio, and all available years. Then you click Add Query under Step 5 and click Run Query. This new page has four maps total (the top one is an average); on each map is the percentage of every state's population who has asthma. You can click and drag any of the three maps at the bottom to the right side to get further information about each year. As you can see, asthma in Ohio has seen a slight increase over the past three years. You can go back and edit any changes you need to make as well, including searching data on other topics. Definitely worth a shot to check out if you ever need to write a research paper.

Other places related to epidemiology would be your local drugstore. You'll probably recognize the big "Pharmacy" signs, such as this one below, in stores such as CVS, Walgreens, or even Kroger.

This is where you would pick up your prescriptions prescribed by your doctor if you've ever had a health condition. Most offer flu shots and sometimes, they even offer clinics if you need a quick checkup and can't make a convenient appointment with your doctor.

Toxicology

Toxicology is the scientific study of chemicals and their effects on living organisms. There are many factors that toxicologists need to take into account when studying and categorizing the toxicity of chemicals such as dosage (the most important), routes of exposure, age, gender, and specific individual characteristics. Before I tell you more, it's important to know what to do if you ever encounter a hazardous chemical. If you visit the American Association of Poison Control Centers website, you will find more information about the nation's free primary source of poison information and their efforts to prevent and treat exposures. If you ever need help or information about toxins, please call the AAPCC any time for your local poison control center at 1-800-222-1222. They also have a link toward the bottom of their website for the National Poison Data System's current annual report. There you will find a comprehensive report of the previous year's call data. Within it, they have statistics on everything you can think of regarding poison: who got what, how, where, why, etc. Did you know that almost half (47.7%) of all human exposures to substances were children less than 6 years old? Even more frightening, more than one-third (35.6%) of all human exposures were children less than the age of 3. More often than none, these children were males. This could have been my nephew (seen below). This picture was taken when he was about 4 years old (6 years ago), shortly after he was diagnosed with Asperger's. To my knowledge, he has never been exposed to any toxic chemicals, but doctors still don't know what caused his disorder.

The current annual report also talks briefly about the statistical reasons for these exposures. For the most part (79.4% of the time), the exposures were unintentional. As I said earlier, the most important characteristics of a chemical is it's dosage. There were over a quarter of a million therapeutic errors in 2014, including double-dosing (the largest at 29.2%), the wrong medication taken or given, other incorrect dose, doses taken/given too close together, and exposure to someone else's medication.
The last section on the report I will talk about is the routes of exposure. By a long run (83.7%), ingestion was the most frequent route of exposure. I'm sure not everyone knows what chemicals they take in daily. I didn't know that the microwavable mashed potatoes I eat as a snack sometimes had so many ingredients.

Who knows what calcium stearoyl lactylate is? If it's in the food we eat, it must be good, right? The next most common route of exposure in 2014 was through the skin at 7%, followed by inhalation at 6.1%, and through the eyes at 4.3%. If we're talking about exposure-related deaths, ingestion again wins at 81.4% of all cases.

Heuristics

Recently, I was almost diagnosed with Celiac Disease. I am not completely allergic to food products that contain gluten but I do have bad side effects if I eat something with gluten in it. My doctor told me to stay on this gluten-free diet. Well, at first I had a lot of struggle with it because I wasn't used to reading the ingredients of everything I eat. Now, I have bad side effects because sometimes I miss the tastiness of pizza or chicken noodle soup and so I just embrace the bad consequences and feed my taste buds. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I am faced with these choices that I often don't take more than 10 seconds to think about, especially at the dining halls here at Ohio University (seen below).

Most of the time, my decision is satisfactory for a short period before the bad effects take place. It's not the most optimal decision, but efficient nonetheless. This is my example of a heuristic. It is the process of which a person makes choices in a quick but efficient manner, regardless of long-term effects. Usually the best decision is one made using long and cautious planning. This method is impractical. The heuristic technique speeds up the process of making choices, allowing people to continue with their daily lives without having to stop and think about what they are going to do next.

While this may seem like the way to go, often this way of thinking leads to error and bias. Just because I choose to eat ramen noodles for lunch yesterday and didn't have any bad consequences, doesn't mean that if I had them today, there won't be bad consequences. I should not rely on this choice over and over again. Heuristics can also lead to stereotyping. People not only create mental shortcuts for their actions but also for remembering other people and their characteristics. Because of this, they tend to forget details and develop categories based on these characteristics which can create stereotypes that do not necessarily accurately describe that person. Some advertisements, even today, feed off of this notion (seen below in Details magazine).