This is the program for the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Abstract Details

Activity Number: 1
Type: Invited
Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
Abstract - #305958
Title: Rethinking John Snow: The Statistics of Cholera
Author(s): Tom Koch*+ and Kenneth Denike
Companies: The University of British Columbia and The University of British Columbia
Address: Dept. of Geography (Medical), VAncouver, BC, V6K 2S1, Canada
Keywords: epidemiology ; cholera ; public health ; Snow, John ; geostatistics
Abstract:

Everyone knows Dr. John Snow, the father of nineteenth century anaesthesiology whose cholera studies are a foundation for modern epidemiology. Famously, Snow argued cholera was a water- rather than airborne disease using two studies, one of a neighbourhood outbreak and, more ambitiously, a study of cholera in South London's registration districts. Here we argue Snow could have, within the science of the day, made a far stronger case if he had used then available statistical methods in the neighbourhood study but not in the regional study of cholera in South London. That study required statistical methods unavailable until the Twentieth Century. Here we employ a combined Bayesian-Frequentist approach to Snow's data to demonstrate a method for the investigation of large-scale neighbourhood disease clusters.


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