Essentials of Epidemiology in Public Health
Ann Aschengrau + George R. Seage III

Essentials of Epidemiology in Public Health covers the basic principles of epidemiology as used in public health, taking a non-technical approach and focusing on understanding studies.

Aschengrau and Seage begin by introducing measures of disease frequency, sources of public health data, and the basics of descriptive epidemiology. Four chapters then cover study design, looking in turn at experimental studies, cohort studies, and case-control studies: the key features of each approach are explained, along with their limitations and strengths and their different variants. There are chapters on bias, confounding, and random error. There's a checklist for critically reviewing studies, with some example applications. And there are chapters on effect measure modification, epidemiological approaches to causation, and the uses (and abuses) of screening.

Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B: A Disease, a Cause, and a Cure
Kenneth J. Carpenter

The symptoms of beriberi are weakness and loss of feeling in the feet and legs, swelling of the lower half of the body, and in the worst cases heart failure and death. It used to be a major contributor to mortality, especially in infants — a third of the workers in one Malaysian mine in just two years, 10% of all births in Manila around 1915, and so forth.

As we now know, beriberi is caused by nutritional deficiency of thiamin (vitamin B1), most commonly associated with reliance on polished white rice. But establishing this, isolating the "vitamin" responsible, and implementing appropriate public health measures was a long and complex process. In Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B Kenneth Carpenter makes of it a fine "medical detective story".