Important lessons I learned from David Goldberg, now Sir David

Some more advice

Opioids in US communities: NPR story

NPR opioids newscast May 2019

Link to transcript and recording.

Heroin supply disappearing? See what DEA (Katherine Pfaff) says near end of article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/health/heroin-fentanyl-deaths-baltimore.html

Heroin in Baltimore, May 2019

Photo of Eastern Baltimore Health District & ECA area rowhouses I took from the train in early 1980s, looking over the RR track berm and up the hill toward Hopkins Hospital.

Corresponding approximate view in 2019 via Google Earth 3D, without obstruction of weeds and trash on RR berm:

Other parts of our Baltimore ECA Survey’s neighborhoods, also early 1980s:

Cocaine deaths in the news, along with psychostimulants

Link to MMWR report

2003-2017

Time to pull out Frank Zappa’s PSA?

Youtube link to Zappa PSA, 16 seconds duration

This image of Zappa often appeared with the sideways quotation.

Listen to “Peaches en Regalia” if you don’t know his music:

Link to Peaches en Regalia, 6 minute version

Great example of how ‘synergy’ differs from ‘interaction’

I think this example might be a case of a departure from an ‘inverse interaction on the additive scale’ for people who would give negative signed ratings to (1) rancid sweat, (2) cabbage, and (3) vinegar, and a positive sign on the dark chocolate. In that case, it is a  clear departure from additivity and more ‘infra-additivity’ rather than ‘supra-additivity’ (for many people). I happen to like the smell of most vinegar (positive sign on that rating), some cabbage, but not rancid sweat.

Link to article in NYTimes, May 15, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/by/veronique-greenwood)

CBD in the news, 2019

Link to NYT article

Brilliant health survey critique by Feldman, 1958

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3348554

Deals with retrospection.

Endogenous and exogenous variable concepts.

Advocates a time series solution (final paragraphs).

Feldman,

Pregnelolone: Cannabis Buzzkill?

Cannabis Buzzkill: The steroid Pregnelolone

From 2018

Indonesia and some interesting thoughts about culture and treatment programs

Traditionally, Indonesia has frowned on drug use.

Death penalty history, etc.

A different perspective here:

Link to NPR description and short NPR radio feature recording.

For the drug use and stigma file?

Opioids, heroin, and asian studies

Link to UN report

You will find the map in the report.

Ahmed (2015) estimated 700 opioid deaths per day in Pakistan.

Consider that number in relation to the US number.

The Human Envirome and a Scholarship Prize to be won.

Something you might be able to use some day.

One of my main points in this invited lecture was to talk about the passivity implied by ‘exposome’ and ‘exposures’ of the type that our 18th century ancestors might have experienced.

In the 21st century, there is a broader array of active behavioral choices that influence the environmental characteristics, circumstances, conditions, and processes we face with potential impact on health and disease, morbidity and mortality.

The behavioral choice to try oxycodone or psilocybin or to travel to Ebola-affected areas of Africa either was non-existent or remarkably rare in the past. 

Today, epidemiology has not yet come to grips with the modeling required to bring behavioral choices into play.

Our closest allies are in econometrics, which has a head start of roughly 50 years in research on behavioral choices (e.g., see origins of McFadden’s choice model, akin to our conditional form of multiple logistic regression for matched risk sets).

Epidemiology cannot ignore what Glen H. Elder called ‘life course’ and this mandate unites epidemiology and econometrics with developmental sciences and Elder’s pioneering conceptual models.

There is a future for epidemiology at this intersection. See some encouragement in an image down below.

A layperson essay on injectable naltrexone (Alkermes’ Vivitrol)

https://oceanbreezerecovery.org/blog/vivitrol/

An entry into issues that deserve more in-depth consideration.

Comments are worth reading.

This month, May. 1997, Clinton Riggs died. Posthumous prevention award is needed.

Link to information about Riggs and his ‘YIELD’ sign

Excerpts from the Gonsalves interview posted yesterday

Community based opioid initiatives

What policy changes would slow the death rate?

We know what to do about opioids. Dayton, Ohio, used to have one of the worst overdose rates the country. They cut it in half. How? They did it by providing naloxone to first responders, which reduced overdose fatalities. They did it by having a clean-needle program, so that drug users stopped sharing needles. They did expanding access to methadone to treat addiction.

By contrast, Scott County in Southern Indiana is a place where the state authorities failed to act decisively. In 2008, public health officials began to discern the first signs of opioid abuse. By 2015, they had 215 cases of H.I.V. in Scott County.

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My colleague Forrest Crawford and I wondered if this could have been prevented. The C.D.C. had data showing when individuals in Scott County were infected and who their contacts were. Using that, we made a computer simulation where one can, essentially, run the epidemic back in time and see what might have been.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/gonsalves-aids-actup-epidemiology.html

Hepatitis and injecting in the news, April 2019

i

https://issuu.com/theepidemiologymonitor/docs/final-april-2019-the-epidemiology-m

Gregg Gonsalves, Yale epidemiologist working on epidemics, MacArthur Awardee

Link

From 1957 (with involvement of Dr. Rema Lapouse)

Heroin and opioids in the UK

A PhD dissertation from the London School: 

Link to online PDF

Hallam, Chris (2016) Script Doctors and Vicious Addicts: Subcultures, Drugs, and Regulation under the ’British System’, c.1917 to c.1960. PhD thesis, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17037/PUBS.03141178

Downloaded from: http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/3141178/ DOI: 10.17037/PUBS.03141178