First Reflection

The way we viewed an epidemiologist with illnesses within communities is very similar to how a doctor is with his patent's individual illnesses. Epidemiology is traced back to 300 BC to Hippocrates who created the correlation between diseases and the environment. A great example of what Hippocrates preached would be John Snow's discovery between the disease cholera and London's town water pump. Even though we fully agreed that the environment has a lot to do with illnesses and the spreading of them, we also believed that illness is also self caused in some cases with people's individual choices which is uncontrolled by epidemiologists. For example cigarette smoking. Epidemiologists can only take the procedures to try and limit the amount of people who smoke cigarettes but sometimes it has to be an individuals choice to quit versus someone trying to force them. Some lifestyles such as heavy partying and drug inducing can lead to other illnesses such as hepatitis or liver disease. This is important to epidemiologists because they are concerned with the rates within a population and all rates are based upon the population at risk. While most people at risk are the very young and the very old, this spectrum is now branching out to people in the "in between" category. This is due to lifestyle choices that we discussed before through diet, lack of exercise, genetics, or poor choices. It used to be that mortality was the number one source of viewing illness however, causes of death is sometimes not an accurate way to provide a clear picture of health for populations. It has to do with geographic regions and then can be segmented into smaller parts within a state. Obviously places like college campuses are going to have more rough housing and deaths by different causes than Florida which has an increasing elderly population. Take for example the girl that was found deceased at Orono a couple weeks ago. It is not as likely to find an elderly person in her same situation.

What makes epidemiologists so important is that they are responsible for diseases and notifying potential outbreaks that could happen in certain areas. They notify hospitals and generate reports which are posted such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. A great example for our time era would be the outbreaks of H1N1 that we have had in the past year. This disease even though it was viewed as being acute but deadly was known about months before the possible H1N1 outbreaks. These reports are great for places like our college campus because people are living in such close quarters and being exposed to many different people and germs all the time. The only downside to the reports issued by the epidemiologists would be that they sometimes don't have the most accurate data and this is due to the doctors being so busy and trying to fit as many patients a day as they can that they sometimes don't find time to notify the epidemiologists about all the outbreaks or diseases that they dealt with in a day. Another downside to these reports is that even though epidemiologists calculate the number of years lost with deceased people but fail to recognise if they were battling another type of disease that is not viewed as chronic such as depression. People do not live enjoyable lives with depression and sometimes can lead to death itself if the disease is serious enough.

Either way epidemiologists are important to our health as a society by trying to provide accurate information to the public about how they can improve their health and prevent disease or to doctors who can provide care for the ill.