My chosen career path is not one which people immediately
know what it means. While in grad
school, my father had to ask me a few times how to pronounce it. After telling people back home what I was
spending all this tuition money on, they would either 1) think it had something to do with skin 2)
thought it had to do with bugs (technically right by the way) or 3) gave me the
blank stare. What am I? I am an epidemiologist (aka
epi), or what I sarcastically call myself, a glorified statistician. I also sometimes joke that epidemiologists are the nerds that everyone gets to do their math homework. But the serious answer I give to distant relatives and people I volunteer with is that I study the spread diseases and work on preventing future
cases using statistics.
To put it a fun way, one of my professors told us this: A
doctor sees someone drowning. He jumps
in, pulls them out, and saves them. He
then sees another person drowning, jumps in, and saves them. He sees another per-...you get the idea. Now, an epidemiologist sees this going on and
decides to walk upstream to see where these people are coming from. He discovers that a bridge going over the
water has a large hole in it that the people are falling through and being
carried downstream to where the doctor is.
The epidemiologist then puts up an “out of order” sign on the bridge to
prevent anyone else from drowning while calling the government to come and fix it.
Does this mean we will eventually make doctors a thing of
the past? Of course not. There will always be people who don’t read the
sign or another hole emerging on another bridge. But that’s beside the point.
Since I study history a lot let’s
discuss the origin of my beloved field.
The word epidemiology comes from Greek words epi meaning “upon,” demos
meaning “people,” and logos meaning
“study.” The father of (modern)
epidemiology is John Snow. Every epi
person knows who this man is just like every biologist knows Charles Darwin. In 1854 London, there was an outbreak of
cholera among its residents. By mapping
the cases on a map of the streets after interview residents, Snow was able to
conclude that the source of the outbreak was the Broad Street water pump. I also vaguely remember something about a brewery in this story but I don't want to sidetrack.
There are older examples of epidemiology as well. The first epidemiologist was Hippocrates (who is also the father of medicine and hence the Charles Darwin or John Snow in his field). During his time (460-377 BC) people believed diseases were caused by supernatural forces. Hippocrates said "au contraire no, they don't". I don't think he actually said it in French but I'm sure he said something similar in Greek. He noted how certain diseases appear to occur in certain areas an seasons. He also coined two of epidemiologist's favorite words: endemic and epidemic.
Now there are others who have played a role in the development of the field but for that I would need to write a book. Fast forward to today. In the US, epidemiology is one of the fastest growing fields what with new disease outbreaks and health research occurring. Epidemiology encompasses all things health including birth defects, old age, obesity, chronic diseases, infectious diseases (yay!), HIV, nosocomial diseases, zonotic diseases, parasites, malnutrition, periodontal diseases....pretty much anything that could go wrong with your health there is an epidemiologist studying it. We work with policy makers for health related laws, microbiologists to figure out what the heck we're dealing with, medical personnel for patient symptoms, statisticians when we don't feel like doing the math, educators to educate the public, economists for cost analysis of a disease/control program, and worldwide organizations to prevent the next pandemic.
