As hypotheses are tested and rejected, the remaining hypotheses are those that plausibly might explain the observed pattern. But how often do we include medications contaminated with foreign agents — fungus, bacteria, or otherwise — in our set of explanatory hypotheses? Until now, rarely, if ever. What we are learning from the New England Compounding Center is that contaminated medications largely explain the observed outbreak of fungal meningitis.
The small numbers problem–Part 2
Using persistence in spatial time series as a diagnostic for extreme rates in small areas. In my last blog on the small numbers problem, we found that rates calculated with small denominators (e.g. small at-risk populations) have high variance and we thus have little...
The small numbers problem Part 1: What you see is not necessarily what you get
The ability to quickly create maps of health outcomes such as cancer incidence and mortality in counties, census areas and even Zip codes is now available through websites and data portals. (See for example Atlasplus, State Cancer Profiles, and Cardiovascular Disease,...