SOCI 2050 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Miasma Theory, Ecological Fallacy, Cholera
30 Sep 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Looking at population health allows us to understand who is at increased risk and better address health concerns. Population health care measures: compare populations across space and time, direct measures: individual level data aggregated to provide overall sense of population (asking, medical charts, health utility index) Indirect measures: individual level focus on markers and lifestyle behaviours connected to health outcomes (smoking, drinking: ecological fallacy: direct inference from population level to specific individuals, proxy measures: population level looks at overall health status (average life expectancy) Goals: understand rate which disease will spread through a population. Identify exposure that made the person with the disease at risk. John snow and 1831 london cholera outbreak: cholera: intestinal infection by bacteria in drinking water, people thought it was contracted through bad air(miasma theory) Snow mapped the outbreak and found that they were all around a specific water pump - he then demanded to shut down the pump and the outbreak subsided.
