Epidemiology, Stats Workshop and Journal Club

Yesterday we had another epi class. I am starting to get the reading done, but I was still kind of lost from being behind. So far though I really like the epi book. It's pretty straightforward to read and the explanations are usually clear.

In the afternoon, my partner and I did our stats workshop presentation. It was just on descriptive statistics, which is kind of boring, so we decided to go ahead and do some t-tests to figure out whether the associations in our data set were significant. It turns out that most of them were, but of course that doesn't explain why they turned out that way. This is one of the weaknesses of association studies as opposed to randomized clinical trials. But that's a discussion for another day. I thought our presentation went well, and as it turns out, we've already done most of the work for the second project since we did the significance stats.

Today's journal club was also really good. One article was about Reye's Syndrome, which is a rare but serious illness that some children get if they have certain viral infections like chicken pox and then take aspirin. The other was about resistance to an antibiotic called ciprofloxacin in the bacteria that cause gonorrhea. That study was done here at CCF. Apparently this was one of the first locations where ciprofloxacin-resistant gonorrhea was detected anywhere in the country. Some claim to fame.