mikecaulfield 's List: Public Health and the Educated Citizen: Core Links

Syllabus for the course.<br/><br/>Brief Description from Syllabus: This is primarily a course about numbers and how they relate to the personal and political decisions we make each day. The topic of Public Health has been chosen because of the fertile ground it provides for discussing how statistics and numeracy might inform our actions as individuals and as a society.<br/><br/>The health topics we’ve chosen are not meant to give a full view of health policy or approaches to public health. Rather, they are meant to serve as entry points to discussions about how we make decisions and what data might have to do with that. We don’t want you to be an expert on public health at the end of this course, or a statistitican. What we *do* want you to be is someone that can look at the often conflicting stories and messages in the news or on the web and understand how you might go about using statistics to separate valid arguments, options, and treatments from quackery and junk science.

"The following is a list of the causes of human deaths worldwide for the year 2002, arranged by their associated mortality rates. There were 57,029,000 deaths tabulated for that year. Some causes listed include deaths also included in more specific subordinate causes (as indicated by the "Group" column), and some causes are omitted, so the percentages do not sum to 100. According to the World Health Organization, about 58 million people died in 2005"