Questions tagged [epidemiology]
The sciences of statistics and systematic analysis applied to the causes of health and disease.
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Is there a correlation between vaccination levels and new COVID-19 cases?
In the study Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States, it is claimed that there is no relation between vaccination and ...
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Was the 2009 swine flu pandemic five times deadlier to children under 18 than COVID-19?
Conservative political analyst, Phil Kerpen recently tweeted
The 2009-10 swine flu was five times deadlier to kids than COVID.
But it didn't hurt boomers, so it didn't stoke an irrational fear/panic ...
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Is bruxism (teeth grinding) linked to parasitic infection?
There seems to be the common conception that bruxism (teeth grinding and jaw clenching) is a symptom of parasitic infections.
For example, this article by a dentist:
Sometimes teeth grinding is ...
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Could a SARS-CoV-2 variant with increased transmissibility lead to more deaths than a variant with increased Case Fatality Ratio?
A January 1, 2021 article by Zeynep Tufekci reported in The Atlantic talks of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 which causes COVID-19.
It states:
A more transmissible variant of COVID-19 is a potential ...
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Do cloth facemasks help prevent the spread of COVID-19 to healthy members of the public?
One of the most politicised scientific issues of 2020 was the question about whether face-masks stop the spread of COVID-19. I trust we can agree that this is notable without requiring specific ...
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Do surgical masks help prevent the spread of COVID-19 from infected members of the public?
One of the most politicised scientific issues of 2020 was the question about whether face-masks stop the spread of COVID-19.
Here are some specific examples:
Australian Department of Health (...
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Is Lyme disease a global pandemic?
Avril Lavigne posted a video on Facebook featuring some celebrities talking about Lyme Disease. At the 0:13 mark, American singer/song-writer, Bebe Rexha, claims:
Lyme disease is a global pandemic, ...
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Are the lockdown methods implemented for COVID-19 unprecedented? [closed]
The The Great Barrington Declaration and it's FAQ make several claims that fly in the face of our approach to this pandemic. The declaration, when read in it's entirety, states lockdowns are not a ...
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Does wearing spectacles protect you from covid?
Yet another surprising study on things that make a difference to the risk of covid has appeared.
This one claims, to quote the report in LiveScience:
People who wear eyeglasses may be at lower risk ...
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Did several countries have very low Coronavirus deaths thanks to inhaled steroids?
A West Texas physician named Richard Bartlett has been making the rounds on social media, claiming that Taiwan, Japan and Iceland have been using inhaled steroids such as budesonide to treat ...
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Did the Black Lives Matter protests fail to cause a spike in coronavirus cases?
Multiple reputable news organizations have been reporting on a study suggesting the 2020 "Black Lives Matter protests" did not contribute to the increase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some have ...
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Is there real scientific consensus linking bats to COVID-19? [closed]
I see a lot of articles in the media mentioning new bat species and adding references in the articles or the titles linking bats to coronavirus [The links in ref1 at the bottom are just some samples]. ...
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Could the COVID-19 mortality rate be way lower than we think, implying vastly more cases? [closed]
I was analyzing some of the data surrounding COVID-19, and was looking at the vastly different mortality rates (calculated as deaths / total cases * 100).
While there are probably many factors ...
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Are the only remaining polio cases in Africa vaccine-derived?
World Polio Day: Wild poliovirus type 3 declared eradicated:
Salisbury also said no WPV1 has been detected anywhere on the African continent since 2016. Several African nations, however, are still ...
user53755
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Were millions of people infected by SARS?
There's an article circulating on Czech social media that makes the following interesting claim, among others (translation mine):
Data that we currently have available say that in areas where SARS ...
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Is COVID-19 more dangerous than typical annual coronavirus variants?
I have heard many people claim in private that COVID-19 is not worse than flu and that the reaction is overblown.
As a poster-child example of this, I want to analyze the claims made by the German ...
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Has the flu already killed 20,000 Americans during 2019-20 flu season?
Fox News has this article titled "Flu has killed 20K Americans including 136 children so far [as of March 2020] in this [2019-20] flu season, CDC says".
The CDC said that so far this season,...
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Have few, if any, studies on the health effects of particulate air pollution measured the actual exposure to particulates?
Air pollution is a major health concern worldwide. One of the major problems is the emissions caused by traffic such as nitrogen dioxide and the small particulates known as PM 2.5 (which are very ...
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Is drinking a half-bottle of wine a night ‘as bad as three cigarettes’
A recent study on the cancer risks of drinking alcohol has been widely reported in news headlines. The Times headline is:
Half-bottle of wine a night ‘as bad as three cigarettes’
The BBC summarise ...
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Does excess salt in food cause thousands of deaths per annum in the UK?
The body responsible for promoting public health in England (prosaically called Public Health England) has faced recent criticism that it it has failed to secure sufficient reductions in the salt ...
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Are polyfluorinated chemicals linked to men's penises being smaller?
A recent story in Huffpost raises the spectre that cooking in non-stick pans could be harming male fertility, not least by making penises smaller:
Chemicals used to make non-stick pans have been ...
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Would higher taxes on sausages and bacon save hundreds of thousands of lives every year?
A recent analysis of the health-related harms associated with red and processed meat has hit the news with headlines like this (from the Guardian):
Taxing red meat would save many lives, research ...
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Does eating organic food reduce your cancer risk?
CNN (and just about every other news source) report the results of a new study on the effects of eating organic food:
You can protect yourself from cancer by eating organic, a new study suggests. ...
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Do diets containing meat and milk cause a large proportion of breast cancer?
Kristi Funk is a breast cancer surgeon, famous (I assume) for treating Angelina Jolie and Sheryl Crow (I assume these are famous people). She has a new book to promote and has been doing publicity for ...
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Are blue lights giving people cancer?
A recent article in Gizmodo reports:
Researchers have linked the modern form of LED street lighting to higher rates of breast and prostate cancer, in a grim development that could have ...
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Is the overprescribing of pharmaceuticals now one of the leading causes of death?
In an article in iNews some British experts have called, among other things, for an enquiry into the overuse of prescription drugs:
Leading British health experts are calling for a Chilcot-style ...
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Does more than one unit of alcohol a day damage your long term brain function and increase the risk of dementia?
In a recent article in the The Times bemoaning modern dietary guidelines the author reports new evidence on the affects of alcohol on the brain (my highlights):
To add to the agony, it coincides with ...
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Are two thirds of cancer mutations random and unavoidable?
The internet is full of cures for cancer and the medical literature (and many newspaper headlines) are full of claims about which specific lifestyle factors make cancer more likely. Some cancers are ...
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Does access to legal marijuana reduce dependence on opiates and other drugs?
It has recently been reported in several news sources that places where access to marijuana has been legalised have seen significant decreases in the use of other, more dangerous, drugs.
In an ...
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Does particulate pollution in outdoor air kill tens of thousands every year?
The effects of particulate pollution have recently been in the news. In the UK the Daily Mail reported:
Toxins emitted by Britain’s booming number of diesel cars are fuelling a health crisis that ...
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Does Texas have the worst maternal mortality in the developed world?
A 2016 article in the Guardian claims that Texas has seen a doubling in the maternal mortality rate after the closure of 80 family planning centres giving obstetric and gynaecology advice to pregnant ...
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Are the Apollo astronauts experiencing heart disease at a higher than average rate?
ArsTechnica used a headline (and this has been reported elsewhere):
Apollo astronauts dying of heart disease at 4-5X the rate of normal humans
What is the evidence relating to the headline's claim?...
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Is the placebo effect getting stronger?
There has recently been a row about the marketing of pain killers. The makers of Nurofen have been accused of selling the same formulation at different prices for different conditions and claiming in ...
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Are child thyroid cancer rates around Fukushima 20—50x higher?
According to Researcher: Children's cancer linked to Fukushima radiation
By YURI KAGEYAMA Oct. 8, 2015 4:25 AM EDT
A new study says children living near the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns have been ...
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Did an experimental Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) cause the AIDS pandemic?
Aidsorigins.com mentioned in a post that:
The oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory of origin of AIDS proposes that an
experimental OPV made in a unique manner was administered to nearly
one million ...
user26068
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What is the *causal* link between smoking and lung cancer? [closed]
I have been discussing smoking with a fellow who states that for all the decades of study of the tobacco leaf, still nobody has managed to find what part of the process of smoking the tobacco leaf ...
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Is Lyme Disease endemic in Australia?
The New South Wales state government's Health department has a fact sheet about Lyme disease:
Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi.
Typical symptoms include fever, ...
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Does colonoscopy screening reduce the risk of death due to colon cancer?
The article Colonoscopy Still ‘Gold Standard’ For Preventing Colon Cancer, Johns Hopkins Expert Says mention that the colonoscopy is the gold standard in detecting colon cancer even though there are ...
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Do societies that are less abstemious have more sensible drinking patterns?
Questions about whether alcohol consumption is good for you or not have been asked here before (see Is alcohol beneficial in small amounts? and Recommended alcohol drinking quantity: are they just ...
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Are medics often incapable of understanding or communicating statistical results to their patients?
A recent news article on the BBC summarises work of Gerd Gigerenzer that argues (my emphasis):
...it's not just that doctors and dentists can't reel off the relevant stats for every treatment ...
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Do 50% of prostitutes have HIV?
The Prostitution Statistics You Have to Know claims that:
50% of prostitutes throughout the world have contracted the HIV virus
(For this statistic it references this BBC news article: The men who ...
user4951
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Does the CDC over-report annual flu deaths in the U.S.?
This blog post claims that the CDC over-reports annual flu deaths in the U.S. by 1000x or more, in an effort to sell flu vaccinations.
Yet, their own numbers show 500 deaths in 2010, not 36,000.
It ...
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Does treating people with mild hypertension improve their outcomes?
There is a reasonably strong relationship between high blood pressure (hypertension) and cardiovascular events such s strokes and heart attacks. As a result, conventional wisdom (as expressed here by ...
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Can oral sex cause throat cancer?
(somebody had to ask this)
Micheal Douglas, who was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2010, said in a recent interview with the Guardian:
Asked whether he now regretted his years of smoking and ...
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Do workplace smoking bans reduce the number of heart attacks?
There is a lively debate on the health impact of passive smoking (other questions on skeptics.se are here Does passive smoking kill 600,000 people every year? and here Is secondhand smoke dangerous?).
...
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Do solar cycles influence life expectancy?
In a paper describing the effects of radiation on the human genome at peaks of solar cycles it is claimed:
Those born in peaks of solar cycles lived an average of 1.5 years (CL 1.3-1.7) less than ...
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Will 25% of people in Western society develop a mental disorder during their life?
In a profile article published in the Cyprus Mail newspaper (Nov. 2012), Dr John Stein, Emeritus Professor of Physiology & Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, claimed:
“a quarter of people in ...
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Does passive smoking kill 600,000 people every year?
While reading David Nutt's book on the harms caused by legal and illegal drugs and how to minimise them (Drugs without the hot air), I came across a claim which reminded me of some previous questions ...
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Did the WHO study show a significant RR of lung cancer, and not a preventative effect?
The WHO released a press release with preliminary finds to the media. After examining the preliminary study, the Telegraph, the Guardian and other newspapers printed articles with headlines like, "...
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Are electronic cigarettes a healthier alternative to regular cigarettes?
Electronic cigarettes pose as a replacement of cigarettes. It is claimed that they help in quitting smoking. They do come in flavors, and in various levels of nicotine.
But, are they less harmful? Do ...
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