Epidemiology
Last week Mukesh and Pragya attended an excellent Epidemiology Course at MGIMS Wardha. Dr Subodh Gupta was one of the main trainers. Am sure many of the NHM and SHRC staff in Chattisgarh will want to attend this course or the longer ERC course in CHTC Vellore. It is worth reading through some of the course material before going. This term comes from the word Epidemic and this is translated as Mahamaari. However Mahamaari Vidya is not a good translation. In fact not all epidemics kill. Also many killing diseases are not communicable and so do not happen in outbreaks. Yet epidemiology has been used to study the effects of smoking resulting in "Hill's postulates" . Wikipedia says- Richard Doll himself stopped smoking as a result of his findings, published in the British Medical Journal in 1950, which concluded; "The risk of developing the disease increases in proportion to the amount smoked. It may be 50 times as great among those who smoke 25 or