A guest editorial from a social scientist who saw firsthand how immunization transformed public health in the 20th century
Medical science has profoundly changed our lives. I am sure that I would not have survived to this old age (95) without antibiotics and advances in epidemiology and surgery.
I was a child in the 1930s. We lived in Southern California in a flat across the street from my grammar school playg...
Margot W. Smith earned a Doctor of Public Health from UC Berkeley and lives in Berkeley, California. She worked as a research social scientist for the State Health Department on projects in environmental health and survey research, for Stanford University on rural healthcare, and for UC Davis and the State of Hawaii in health planning. Her publications are online at ResearchGate.
As I write, the U.S. is seeing measles outbreaks spread across the country. The epicenter is South Carolina, where there…
Of all the public health advances over the past century, I’m hard pressed to think of a bigger success story than…
Throughout the pandemic, I’ve heard the term herd immunity bounced around. What exactly is that? Herd immunity…
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