Sunday, January 31, 2016

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.