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What are pandemics? The National Institutes of Health proposed pandemics must meet eight criteria: wide geographic extension, disease movement, high attack rates and explosiveness, minimal population immunity, novelty, infectiousness, contagiousness, and severity. The introduction explains that much of the way we confront pandemics now has been shaped by the past history of pandemic and epidemic disease. There is a clear relationship between disease and social conditions, conditions that do not exist everywhere and that will not be alleviated with biomedicine. The question of susceptibility—who gets a disease and why—is also important. Epidemics and pandemics cannot occur without a dense and mobile population. ...Less

‘Illness, death, and the demographic impact’ outlines how the effects of AIDS can be measured through demographic indicators. Demographic consequences of AIDS may include: increased deaths especially among adults; rising infant and child mortality; falling life expectancy; changes in the population size, growth, and structure; and growing numbers of orphans. How serious these impacts are depends on the location, size, and age of the epidemic; the underlying demographics of a country; and, increasingly, the availability and uptake of treatment. The impacts of AIDS continue to be felt by families and communities after death. There is evidence that AIDS deaths have more serious consequences for survivors than deaths from other causes. ...Less

The selection of cases is the starting point of case-control studies and obeys the fundamental and rather obvious principle that they should come from the same study population as the cases. Ascertaining exposure very often involves interviewing cases and controls about a variety of factors to which they may have been exposed, ranging from smoking habits through diet to medical history, depending on the purpose of the study. ‘Investigating other people's past experiences’ points out that whereas the prospective study observes events in their natural course from causes to possible effects, a case-control study observes the events in a reverse sequence, from effects to possible causes. ...Less