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Dr Ellie Murray, ScD Profile picture
@EpiEllie
May 18 • 4 tweets • 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
“Funny” story: the US used to have a whole industry of private investigative epidemiologists people could hire to trace the source of their illness.

Why? Because there used to be a lot more really awful infectious diseases and people are willing to pay when the stakes are high.
Morale of this story: when rich people don’t have good options to protect themselves and their families, capitalism finds a way.

We have good tools we could use. But if we don’t use them, people are very likely going to get litigative.
Curious to read more? I recommend Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health. By Judith Walzer Leavitt Cover image for Typhoid Mar...
Back in 2020, we read this book together as part of the #EpiBookClub. Check out the tweets below👇🏼 and at #TyphoidMaryBook

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More from @EpiEllie

Dr Ellie Murray, ScD Profile picture
May 16
“Funny” story: when doctors learned washing their hands reduced infections, they actually *did* give up washing their hands after the guy figured it out left. And then more people died.

And even today, hospitals spend BIG money reminding & convincing doctors to wash their hands.
The moral of this story?

Hospitals ALREADY agree it’s important to ensure everyone takes precautions against infection, even when it’s kinda a hassle.

It’s time to step up & protect patients from respiratory infections.
Curious to know more? Read about Semmelweis and the discovery of hospital-acquired infections here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Sem…
Read 5 tweets
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD Profile picture
May 13
It’s Saturday, so let’s get controversial about public health & medicine.

Grab a coffee, a tea, a snack, your choice. Then read this short thread, & weigh in with your comments!

Today’s topic: how do we choose public health policies?
When evaluating & deciding between public health intervention or policy choices, it’s never simply a matter of “do they work?” or even “which works better?”.

Instead, decision-makers generally want to know “are they worth it?” and “which one is ^more^ ‘worth it’?”
At it’s core, this comes from the feeling that we should only be putting policies in place if they are on balance more good than bad.

That’s a reasonable goal. But, even though this question seems simple, it’s ridiculously hard to answer!
Read 11 tweets
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD Profile picture
May 13
I’ve seen a bunch of people dunking on this take, but I think that Noah is being explicit about something many many people think:

that the question you ask is more important that the quality of the answer you receive.

This is a problem bigger than chat-gpt. Image
I’ve seen this attitude from all kinds of people.

It’s the same attitude that says “any RCT is better than any other type of data” no matter its flaws

It’s the same attitude that says “this grant proposal asks such an important question, we’ve gotta fund it” no matter its flaws
Ask yourself, have you ever said or thought: “this paper/book/documentary is on such an important topic, I’m sure it’s right!”

That’s the same attitude that prioritizes being able to ask chatGPT the question you want above caring about whether the answer is relevant.
Read 5 tweets
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD Profile picture
May 11
Last week, I tweeted that epidemiology is the science of public health.

But what *is* epidemiology?

A thread🧵
First, a caveat for other public health practitioners & epidemiologists: this thread is not meant to 100% characterize all of epi or all of public health.

I couldn’t do that even in a whole book.

Many public health professionals do science, not just epidemiologists.
Science in public health is also not only epidemiology. It also includes biology, virology, ecology, chemistry, physics, engineering, etc.

Public health professionals are probably working with just about every field imaginable.
Read 25 tweets
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD Profile picture
May 11
I got real candid with @andrewsthurston about what the “end of the emergency” really means for you and me and all our loved ones and communities. 👇🏼👇🏼
@RougeMatisse pulls some key quotes in her thread👇🏼
Read 4 tweets
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD Profile picture
May 9
The thing about “evidence-based” medicine or parenting or nutrition or whatever is that people who hype this approach never seem to care to much about how that “evidence” is obtained and whether it can actually inform any of the choices they want to make.
The simple fact is that for almost every problem we are still trying to solve, the “evidence” about what to actually *do* to solve that problem is precisely the thing we are missing.
Often all we really know is what the problem looks like, from a whole bunch of different angles. Because *that* is much easier to learn.
Read 7 tweets

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