contrarian analysis of "childhood obesity epidemic"

RT @EpiRen: From @EpiApril: You may be an epidemiologist if… #epidemiology

Grand #narrative of the past 500 years:#longnow http://t.co/ALkbqKVe #podcast #good #potato #malaria #slavery #nitrogen #lue #global

<a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?tab=cm#inbox/1371872bceaf45a3">link </a>

"Each year infectious diseases kill 3.5 million people – mostly the poor and young children who live in low and middle income countries. Research can change this and bring health to many more people. TDR has brought people and institutions together to identify and advocate for the research priorities that will bring new and innovative approaches and products.

The result is Global Report for Research on Infectious Diseases of Poverty , which provides a new cross-disciplinary approach and analysis. It is essential reading for policy-makers, funders and research leaders."

Parameters that should be theoretically equal often aren’t so in the real world. Ideally everyone should have the same potential to transmit an infection during a given outbreak, but it has long been observed that this isn’t true. Super-spreaders play an extraordinary role in driving outbreaks of infectious disease. A super-spreader is a person who transmits an infection to a significantly greater number of other people than the average infected person. The occurrence of a super spreader early in an outbreak can be the difference between a local outbreak that fizzles out and a regional epidemic.

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact

"The 2011 Revision presents estimates and projections of the total, urban and rural populations of the world for the period 1950-2050."