environmental epidemiology

According to the definition of the epidemiology and genomics research program under the national cancer institute, environmental epidemiology seeks to understand how physical, chemical, biologic, as well as, social and economic factors affect human health. Social factors, that are where one lives, works, socializes or buys food, often influence exposure to environmental factors.

To learn more on the environmental epidemiology, people could visit their website at ephtracking.cdc.gov. The purpose of this blog is to introduce how to get access to the website and what information could be find in the website.

People could go to the home page at http://ephtracking.cdc.gov/showHome.action, than click childhood leading poisoning under the health effects. The website will lead all the information about the childhood leading poisoning.

The data search link could help people to open the networking tool to search the data they want to have. They have four steps to let people finish their search program. The first step is to select the mode, people could choose basic or advanced mode to continue. Step two is to select the connect. People could choose the indicator and the measure for their search. Step three is to choose the geography and time. People could choose the location and the period time they want to go through. The 4th step is the advanced options. People could ask for more detailed question for the program to search, for example if the research require the gender or not. The 5th step is to submit the requirement and check the search result. The result could be print or save as the file.

People could also use this networking tools to do research on other topics on the website like asthma, birth defects, heart disease, heart stress illness, cancer, carbon monoxideposioning, developmental disabilities, and Reproductive and Birth Outcomes.


The purpose of this blog is to introduce how to get access to the website and what information could be find in the website.

hospital in China Source:http://www.avicopter.net/

Hospital in Athens, OHIO Source: http://www.ecihealthcarepartners.com/news/o_bleness_memorial_hospital_in_athens_ohio

The phone number for the American Association of Poison Control Centers is 1-800-222-1222, and the official website address is www.aapcc.org. In the current annul report, it has explained three issues, which are age & gender distribution, reason for exposure and the route of exposure.

Source:http://www.consumermedsafety.org/safe-medicine-storage-and-disposal/babysitters

Age and Gender Distribution

The age and gender distribution of human exposures is outlined in Table 3 in the annul report. 35.6% of exposures are related to the children who under 3 years old. In addition, approximately half (47.7%) of all human exposures are related with the children who are under 6 years old.

The cases analysis shows that for the case with children under 13, most of the predominance was male.  However, this gender distribution was different in teenagers and adults, females are the majority of cases with reported exposures.

Reason by Age

Basically, most exposures related to the children are unintentional and most of the cases related to the adults are intentional exposures.

According to the annul report, Intentional exposures accounted for 16.7% of human exposures. Suicidal intent was suspected in 11.2% of cases, intentional misuse in 2.5% and intentional abuse in 2.2%.

Unintentional exposures outnumbered intentional exposures in all age groups with the exception of ages 13– 19 years. Intentional exposures were more frequently reported than unintentional exposures in patients aged 13-19 years.

In contrast, of the 1,173 reported fatalities with RCF 1–3, the major reason reported for children[1]5 years was unintentional while most fatalities in adults were intentional.

Route of Exposure

According to the annul report, the big three of the most frequency route are Ingestion, Dermal and Inhalation/nasal.

Ingestion was the route of exposure in 83.7% of cases, followed in frequency by dermal (7.0%), inhalation/nasal (6.1%), and ocular routes (4.3%). For the 1,173 exposure-related fatalities, ingestion (81.4%), inhalation/ nasal (10.1%), unknown (7.8%) and parenteral (5.2%) were the predominant exposure routes.

Each exposure case may have more than one route.

China milk poisoning chemical found in Tesco sweets, source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3071908/China-milk-poisoning-chemical-found-in-Tesco-sweets.html

heuristics

According to the Webster dictionary heuristic is involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods.

A heuristic is a easy way to permits individuals to tackle issues and make judgments rapidly and effectively based on the experience or common sense.

These rule-of-thumb methodologies will lower the time of thinking and permit individuals to work without always ceasing to consider their next strategy. Heuristics are useful in many ways; however, they can also create biases.

Heuristics could be critical parts in both critical thinking and decision-making.

When people are attempting to solve one issue or make a choice, people frequently use heuristics to make the quick choice when people are required to make a fast arrangement.

The world is loaded with data, and the brain could not scan and analysis all of the data at the first time.  The fast choice could not let people to break down each data and analysis each circumstance or choice.

Because the final goal is to solve the issue, so we do not need to analysis all the data related to the problem.  Heuristics could use the data we experienced and to accelerate the choice making progress, the brain relies on these mental strategies to simplify things so we don't need to examine everything about the issue.

According to Cherry (2015), two basic heuristics incorporate the accessibility heuristic and the representativeness heuristic.

The availability heuristic means the final choice is based on how easy it is to bring something to mind on the decision- making progress.  When people start to look questions the brain will quickly remember a number of relevant examples. Since these are many experience or related knowledge in memory, people will use these memory to make decision. For example, if people trying to book a fight to travel, and he remembered several bad news about the air-fight company, he might change his mind to book another company's fight. 

Retrieved from http://www.airzena.com/?l=E&m=6&sm=42

The representativeness heuristic means when people make decisions, they will compare the present situation to the most representative mental prototype. For example, some people will look other's dress or behavior to guess their jobs. 

Retrieved from http://giftedhealthcare.com/

EH-2000

This blog is for the EH-2000, Introduction to Environmental Health Spring 2016