Medmastery: PPV and Specificity
Franz Wiesbauer looks at the impact of specificity and sensitivity on positive predictive value (and thus validity of a test) and why one has a bigger impact than the other.
Category Epidemiology
Medmastery: Mortality rate
Franz Weisbauer explains how to calculate mortality rates for various subgroups, proportionate mortality, and why proportionate mortality is not a measure of risk.
Benjamin Babington
Benjamin Guy Babington (1794-1866) was an English physician and epidemiologist. Inventor of the laryngoscope in 1829
John Alfred Ryle
John Alfred Ryle (1889–1950) was an English physician and epidemiologist. Coined the phrase angor animi; and the Ryle nasogastric tube bears his name
Denis Burkitt
Denis Parsons Burkitt (1911 - 1993) was an Irish surgeon. Burkitt lymphoma (1958)
Medmastery: prognosis and life tables
Franz Wiesbauer explains how to express prognosis with the help of life tables and why this is essential to understanding Kaplan Meier curves.
Medmastery: PPV and prevalence
Franz Wiesbauer looks at how a doctor can work out the probability of disease when confronted with a positive or a negative test result and how the prevalence of a given disease affects this probability.
Just Read the Map
John Snow (1813-1858) was one of the first anaesthetists – he even chloroformed Queen Victoria! – but today he is famous for his investigation of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in Soho, London. By mapping the cases of cholera…
Investigative Epidemiology
Putting your head above the parapet Part of the joys of studying at the Liverpool Tropical School of Medicine is the weekly Wednesday lunchtime lectures. This week we were treated to investigative journalist Deborah Cohen (@deb-cohen), an award winning medically…