Epidemiology as a liberal art: from graduate school to middle school, an unfulfilled agenda
1Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology, Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, Yale University School of Public Health, New Haven, CT; Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; Department of Neurology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT.
Abstract:
Calls by Lilienfeld, Fraser, and others some three decades ago to introduce epidemiology into undergraduate college education remain largely unfulfilled. Consideration of epidemiology as a "liberal art" has also led to exploring possibilities for introducing epidemiology into early education: to high and even middle schools. Adding epidemiology to school curricula should help educate the public to understand science-based evidence concerning the causes and treatments of disease, help inoculate them against a tsunami of biased and fraudulent media messaging, and permit advancing postgraduate education in epidemiology to even higher levels of scholarship.
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