Japanese Study

Hirayama's study was designed to assess the relationship between passive smoking and the occurrence of lung cancer in the wives of smoking husbands in Japan. The study followed 91,450 wives that fit the criteria. They followed the 91,450 couples for a 14-year period between 1961 and 1974. The 91,450 women constituted %91-%99 of the target population. The study also tracked the effects of passive smoking on the occurrence of stomach cancer, emphysema, and asthma. The results showed a direct correlation between the women who were married to heavy cigarette smokers have a half to third greater chance of contracting lung cancer. The results also indicated that asthma and emphysema were higher in this cohort. There was no statistical evidence to suggest that there is a correlation between being married to a smoker and the occurrence of stomach cancer in the wife.

The scale of the study is what I think is most important. Keeping track of nearly 100,000 must have required a tremendous amount of funding and man-hours to regularly check up on that many people.  With such a large sample size, it is very hard for anyone to dispute the relationships between the passive smoking in partners and the occurrence of lung cancer in the wife. I was also surprised about the fact that wives of smokers in agricultural areas were significantly more likely to contract lung cancer than there urban counterparts. The study attributes this to the larger amount of time that couples spend together in agricultural settings, but I thought the population density and close living situation of urban centers would cause  greater harm than the extra time together.

The benefits of using a cohort study in this situation is two fold: firstly it allows for the study to follow the subjects for long periods of time, as well as being able to effectively follow large numbers in order diffuse doubters who would otherwise have concerns about the determining a relationship in a small sample size. Also, the cohort study allowed for the study to take into account other possible environmental factors that may have skewed the results of the study, such as the wives’ personal habits, living situation, and location.

I believe the study had convincing results, particularly because the study spanned through all kinds of environments. The study did not just focus on smokers in urban settings, but also rural, and agricultural settings. The study was most convincing because the relative risk values that were greater than one strongly support a relationship between lung cancer and passive smoking, with husbands who smoked twenty or more cigarettes a day. I also believe that it was important that the study interviewed the couples independently because it maximized the honesty of the responses. 

Intro

Hi everyone,

My name is Daniel Ramos and I am a junior double International and Latin American Studies major. I am originally from Los Angeles, California and lived in Boston, Massachusetts for a couple years. I am taking this course because I am very interested in urban policy for graduate school and possibly a career. I took this class because I understand that there is often a disconnect between the science of public health and the policy makers and/or politicians that are responsible for the implementation of public health in an urban setting. I hope that my blog will take the perspective of a city administrator, policy advisor, or politician, and I hope that I can collaborate with those a more science perspective on public health in class to bridge the disconnect that exists between the two groups.  I understand that public health policy is a pivotal part of maintaining a healthy successful city, and as such I thought taking Intro to Public Health would be a perfect opportunity to widen my knowledge of public policy as it relates to public health in a metropolitan area. I believe public health is the study of attempting to improve the well being of the entire society rather than on an individual case by case basis. I believe public health includes the study of disease prevention, nutrition, socio-economic disparities, and hygiene. In have a strong interest in urban policy, particularly in city management and working with underprivileged communities, both of which relate strongly with to public health policy. After working with poverty stricken communities, especially metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles Boston, and Baltimore, I have come to realize that impoverished communities experience public health issues to a magnified degree because of population density, lack of health care, lack of education, poor dietary habits which leads to under nutrition, poor sanitary conditions, and poor hygiene. I am interested in public health because I want to know what the politicians and their policy advisors can do to help empower and educate impoverished communities on public health issues in order to shrink the socio economic disparities that plague low income communities. My general impression of the first four classes is that we will be dealing with the policy aspects of public health rather than the science of it. I am a little surprised at the macro level perspective that public health takes within their field of study. I was very interested to hear about the history and statistics of public health. I have zero doubt that advances in public health have had a direct effect on the ability of metropolitan areas to grow to the size that they have grown to today. So far I have enjoyed our first two weeks of class and I hope the rest of the semester proves to be as interesting and informative as these first two weeks. I look forward to hearing feed back from my fellow classmates, the professor, and the teaching assistants.

Daniel