Epi News Briefs 6/25/01

 

Editor's Quote of the Week "It's telling that 20 years into this epidemic, we can't even name the vulnerable groups and do something for them" Joanne Csete, a public health expert at Human Rights Watch, commenting in the New York Times on the difficulty in forging a United Nations consensus on how to address the AIDS epidemic. The UN is meeting this week about AIDS.

A full report on the Congress of Epidemiology 2001 will appear in the July issue of The Epidemiology Monitor. Subscribe now to obtain full coverage, including scores of photos taken at the Congress.

Student Prize Paper Finds That Black Tea Drinking Lowers Risk of Rectal Cancer

An Azerbaijan native in the former Soviet Union and biologist who immigrated to the United States in 1991 has won the 2001 prize for the best student paper in epidemiology. Dora Il’yasova from UNC reported her results at the Congress of Epidemiology in Toronto this month. She studied 663 incident cases of rectal cancer from the Moscow region and 323 controls who were interviewed on a wide variety of exposures. Overall, the level of highest tea consumption was associated with an odds ratio of 0.40 (0.32-0.70) in women and 0.77 (0.42-1.43) in men. The attenuation of the protective effect in men was attributed to higher levels of alcohol consumption.

More Than 8,000 SIDS Deaths Could Have Been Prevented With Earlier Implementation Of Policy On Infant Sleep Position

Kate Pickett, a University of Chicago epidemiologist, has estimated that 8,488 excess deaths due to SIDS could have been avoided between 1991-1994 if existing evidence from the 1980’s demonstrating that sleeping in a supine position reduces SIDS deaths by up to 50% had been accepted earlier in the United States. Pickett presented her findings at the Congress of Epidemiology in Toronto. She hypothesized that the delay in acting on epidemiologic data from other countries was likely attibutable to the reluctance to accept new findings and to change existing practices on the part of advisory groups and clinicians. Also, concerns were expressed about the generalizability of data from other countries.

Leaders of 17 Epidemiology Associations Meet In Toronto

The leaders of 17 separate epidemiology associations or interest groups met in Toronto to discuss means of improving communication between the groups and to identify means of collaborating more effectively. Among the actions agreed to at the meeting were: 1) the creation of a common website where the names and contact information for the officers of all the associations could be found, 2) the creation of a new listserv whose members would include the leaders from all of the different organizations, and 3) the holding of periodic conference calls for the leaders.

Feedback is desired from the wider epidemiology community, according to Betsy Foxman the APHA Epi Section President who organized the meeting, on whether or not another Congress should be organized, and if so, when? A second concern the leaders had was to learn more from the epidemiology community about what issues the profession should seek to address with one voice.

Expert Corrects Estimate About Risk of Lyme Disease

Durland Fish, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Yale University, has taken the pains to write a letter to the New York Times to correct an estimate of Lyme disease risk. In a NEJM article on Lyme disease, the risk of catching Lyme from a tick was estimated to be 3%, but that was only for persons who removed the tick, according to Fish. More frequently, a tick in the nymph stage is the size of a poppy seed and very difficult to find. Such ticks have a very high infection rate of 25-30% and nearly all will cause Lyme disease if not removed. The key is to do everything possible to prevent tick bites in the first place, according to Fish.

 

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