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Climate and Infectious Diseases: The Past as Prologue
Pages 12-19

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From page 12...
... The seasonal appearances of particular diseases formed the basis of the Hippocratic treatise on epidemics, and many aphorisms handed down over the centuries similarly attributed various morbid conditions to weather and seasonal change (Hannaway, 1993~. Hippocratic medicine focused on predicting the course and outcome of an illness through detailed observations of clinical symptoms and through associations with the way that winds, waters, and seasons appeared to make some diagnoses more likely (Smith, 1979~.
From page 13...
... On a more practical level, the extraordinary costs of plague brought a demand for novel strategies in public intervention. In order to predict and manage the local appearance of an epidemic, Italian bureaucrats in the fifteenth century designed mortality registers as a way to anticipate and monitor epidemic disease, leading to the study of temporal and geographical spread of infection.
From page 14...
... Continuing interest in distinctive American storms helped inspire record keeping long after European physicians concluded that weather crises could not easily be linked to epidemics (Monmonier, 1999~. Because of the severity of the monsoon season in South Asia, British physicians in India also pursued climatic explanations for epidemics far longer than their European counterparts (rein and Stephens, 1987~.
From page 15...
... The enormous century-long collection of observational meteorological data fueled much of the effort to develop models for making weather predictions. Lewis Frye Richardson, a young mathematician and physicist, devised mathematical equations that would transform atmospheric data from one place and time into a prediction of the weather six hours later.
From page 16...
... Younger, statistically knowledgeable epidemiologists accepted the fundamental determinism of germ theory that a particular microorganism would be found responsible for any given disease. Most Europeans adopted the gospel of urban water purification, followed by the laboratory evidence and logical proof of the germ theory (Evans, 1978~.
From page 17...
... In this view the post-World War II era witnessed the "second revolution" in epidemiology, a reordered focus on environmental risk factors leading to chronic diseases. "Environmental" by the 1950s included behaviors or habits, along with the old "airs, waters, and places." Notable studies included the association of tobacco smoking with lung cancer and of particular diets and lifestyles with cardiovascular mortality (Susser,1985~.
From page 18...
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From page 19...
... Clinical medicine and epidemiology emphasize the identification of disease causes and treatment rather than prediction of future disease outbreaks. In contrast, modern meteorology has focused on prediction, to offset the most deleterious consequences of weather events.


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