When Carleton University hosted the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CSEB) conference in May 2019, the terms COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 had not yet been invented, let alone uttered.
As Prof. Paul Villeneuve puts it in a new paper published in The Canadian Journal of Public Health, the pandemic is creating “a heightened recognition that the discipline of epidemiology is a critical component of public health.”
The editorial, called Always better together: the Canadian Journal of Public Health and the Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, was co-authored by McGill University Prof. Gilles Paradis, and University of Saskatchewan Prof. Nazeem Muhajarine.
Together, the three authors have co-edited a new special section in the Canadian Journal of Public Health called the Special Section on Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and it’s a development that directly results from the 2019 conference.
This conference attracted over 300 participants, and several undergraduate and graduate students from Carleton’s Department of Health Sciences volunteered to help with the organization of the conference.
The conference, called Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Nexus of Complex Health Challenges, brought together experts from two interrelated sciences to discuss how to improve health and well-being through research and practice.
And it is these discussions that led to the six new papers, that were presented at the CSEB conference at Carleton, published in the Journal’s upcoming special section.
These papers cover a wide-ranging number of topics in health research including maternal health, analyses of small area data, health and aging, physical activity and obesity, immigrant health, and issues around the identification of minorities and racialized persons on health surveys.
As the piece by Villeneuve, Paradis and Muhajarine state, “Taken together, these papers illustrate the dynamic nature of epidemiological research in Canada and its important contributions to improving our understanding of public health. They further emphasize the importance of methodological rigour and the application of sound epidemiological principles for the design of population research and analysis of health data. Finally, they reinforce the need for close collaborations and partnerships between the Canadian epidemiological, biostatistical, and public health communities in our unrelenting work to improve the health of all Canadians.”
Read each article by clicking the links below:
- Identifying visible minorities or racialized persons on surveys: can we just ask?
- Vitamin D status, cognitive decline and incident dementia: the Canadian Study of Health and Aging
- Associations of prenatal urinary phthalate exposure with preterm birth: the Maternal-Infant Research on Environmental Chemicals (MIREC) Study
- A Bayesian shared components modeling approach to develop small area indicators of social determinants of health with measures of uncertainty
- Association between the regional variation in premature mortality and immigration in Ontario, Canada
- Methodological approaches to the design and analysis of nonrandomized intervention studies for the prevention of child and adolescent obesity