Articles

Everyday Public Health: How Small Actions Protect Your Community

Everyday choices — from recycling to vaccination — can help protect your community.

Sleep Apnea and CPAP: What the Science Says

An honest look at how CPAP works, what the evidence shows, and why the machine is worth it.

The Sleeping Sickness Epidemic That Medicine Still Can’t Explain

How encephalitis lethargica disabled a million people in the 1920s, and what it warns us about Long COVID today

If Correlation Is Not Causation, Then What Is?

There are rules for what makes a “causal association,” but not everyone knows them or follows them.

Vaccines Have Protected the U.S. Military for 250 Years. We Keep Learning That the Hard Way.

From smallpox in George Washington’s army to flu outbreaks in today’s training camps, U.S. military history has proved that vaccine…

Think Like an Epidemiologist: 5 Skills for a Misinformation Age

The mental habits disease detectives use, and how they apply to headlines, arguments, and daily life.

Five Parasites That Quietly Shaped Human History

From malaria and schistosomiasis to the parasite living inside one-third of humanity, how these organisms have decided wars, reshaped where…

From Gambling Tables to Bell Curves: The History of Statistical Distributions

How gamblers, astronomers, a brewer, and a few brilliant mathematicians built the tools that power modern data analysis.

The Science of Pet Ownership: What Research Says About Dogs and Your Health

From cardiac outcomes to childhood allergies, here’s what the science actually says, and what it doesn’t.

Reading Only Scientific Papers That Confirm Your Fears Is Just as Bad as Reading Fake News

Why one scary study doesn't tell the whole story about person-to-person transmission of hantavirus, and what the evidence actually shows.

When Disaster and Disease Collide: A Public Health Warning

The next superstorm could be a lot worse than most people think. Declining vaccination rates, aging infrastructure, and underfunded health…

The Urban and Rural Health Myth: Why More Hospitals Don’t Always Mean Better Health Outcomes

What asthma rates, rural access, and a local health board meeting reveal about the hidden layers behind public health data.

What a Preprint Can’t Tell Us About Hantavirus’ Contagiousness

Why Americans Panicked About Cruise Ship Hantavirus But Ignored Nipah Virus

Hantavirus on the MV Hondius got wall-to-wall coverage. Nipah has been killing people in South Asia for 25 years. The gap between those two…

Hantavirus on a Cruise Ship: What the MV Hondius Outbreak Actually Means for You

The first shipboard hantavirus cluster is raising serious questions about hantavirus person-to-person transmission.

How Kid EPI Got Built: A Pixel-Art Detour Through Epidemiology

I did not set out to design a video game. I set out to teach epidemiology, first to undergraduates, then to graduate students. Now, to kids…

Stop Trusting Online Horror Stories Until You Read This

Berkson’s Bias explains why complaint threads and adverse event reports give you a distorted picture of reality.

Raw Milk Isn’t a Health Hack: It’s a Skipped Safety Step

Why the DIY “solution” to raw milk’s bacteria problem is exactly what dairies have been quietly doing since the 1860s.