Editors of The Epidemiology Monitor are always on the lookout for quotable quotes and these are often featured in the margins of the articles published in the newsletter. The start of a new year is an opportunity to review these quotes and others contained in articles published in the newsletter. Below is our editor’s pick for the best quotes of the year.

1. “No call, no text, no update is worth a human life.”

Deborah Hersman, Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, speaking about the dangers of distracted driving in our February issue.
 

2. “Effective policy is the tip of the spear by which evidence becomes practice…we do advocacy because advocacy helps save lives.”

Michael Klug, Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health writing in a letter to school alumni in our March issue


3a. “A good school is good contraception” and

3b. “School retention is pregnancy prevention”

Robert Blum, head of the Johns Hopkins Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, speaking as the Alexander Langmuir lecturer at CDC and published in our April issue


4. “Poverty is the slavery of the 21^st century”

Bill Foege, epidemiologist and former director of the CDC, commenting on the occasion of his receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom published in our May issue
 

5a. “Behind every public health victory is a champion or a group of champions.”

5b. “Political leaders do what they believe the people who are active care about”

Matthew Myers, President of The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids” during his keynote address to a special meeting of the Young Epidemiology Scholars group published in our June issue.
 

6. “I’m an American, so I don’t have to.”

A statement made by Sean Carroll from the University of Wisconsin to describe one of six types of arguments (appeal to personal freedom) made by persons who deny scientific evidence (which works particularly well with Americans), published in our September issue.
 

7. “Epidemiology was born exactly 350 years ago.”

Alfredo Morabia, Columbia University epidemiologist, speaking at an epidemiology meeting in Portugal and seeking to persuade his audience that epidemiology did not begin at the time of John Snow but instead at the appearance of John Graunt’s Political Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality in 1662. He likened the appearance of this book to the conceptual “big bang” that gave birth to the “universe” of epidemiology.
 

8a. “If you truly want to make a difference with your life, epidemiology can give you the key.”

Jennifer Schindler, student at Columbia University, making an observation about something she learned as a result of participating in the Young Epidemiology Scholars Program

8b. The fact that in public health, our mission is to discover and to translate those discoveries into ways that change the world and alleviate or prevent suffering is a pretty amazing thing.”

Michelle Williams, on the occasion of being named the new Epidemiology Chair at Harvard.

9. “One’s ethical and political worldview influences the many phases of the scientific process.”

Statement made about “unconscious partiality” in the updated ethics guidelines for environmental epidemiologists released in 2012 by the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology published in September issue.

10. “Sue is to injury prevention what Einstein was to theoretical physics.”

A colleague of Susan Baker’s at Johns Hopkins commenting on her role in injury prevention in an article profiling Baker in the Sunday New York Times magazine published in our November issue.
 

11. “Evidence-influenced politics is potentially a more informative metaphor than evidence-based policy.”

The National Research Council commenting on the value of different metaphors used to inform thinking about the interface of evidence and the use of science.
 

12. “Our faculty have an almost evangelical belief that educating people about public health is a good thing.”

Hopkins Dean Michael Klug explaining why his school is offering courses free of charge on line.

13a. “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

Bart Holland from the New Jersey medical school quoting Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate, in an exchange in the newsletter with Alex Broadbent from the University of Johannesburg about the value of philosophy for epidemiology.

13b. “The birds, or most of them, would agree with Feynman, since most of them are too busy being birds to worry much about the scientists studying them. That is right and proper and just what you would expect. But it does not mean that Feynman was right; only that he had more in common with the birds than the ornithologists.”

Alex Broadbent, in response to Holland’s comment published in letters to the editor in our January issue.


14. “The brain is an important gateway by which the social environment impacts on people’s health through the mind.

Michael Marmot, UK epidemiologist, in an interview he gave while traveling in Australia published in our May issue.                                                                                                     


 

15. “…it really takes a lot of changes like Philadelphia has made, so  it’s not going to be sugary drinks out of schools, though that’s really important. It’s not going to be shifting to lower fat milk, though that’s important, but each of these small steps is what will add up to the kind of changes we need. And I think it’s very important because you’re almost always asked, well if you had to do one thing, what would it be? And the answer is, you’ve got to do it all.”

Robert Wood Johnson’s James Marks commenting in CDC’s Preventing Chronic Diseases publication on a recent 5% decrease in prevalence of obesity in Philadelphia schoolchildren.

16a. What are your allegiances? Do these allegiances have priorities? To the truth? To the social welfare? To employers? What is epidemiology all about?

Questions first posed in 1989 at an epidemiology and ethics meeting in Birmingham Alabama just prior to. the meeting of the Society for Epidemiologic Research by a professor of ethics and reprinted as part of our lead story in the October issue on the creation of a new knowledge translation subspecialty.

16b. “All epidemiologists have a fundamental ethical obligation and commitment to enhance population health.”

Robert McKeown, in response to a proposal to create a new knowledge translation subspecialty in epidemiology published in the October issue

17. “I believe health is a matter of agency; it is health that provides the conditions that enable humankind to thrive.

Kevin Xu, student at Columbia University, commenting after participating in the Young Epidemiology Scholars Program
 

18a. “This is akin to the world experiencing another Holocaust every year!”

Statement by The Epidemiology Monitor reporting that WHO estimates that 6 million people die from tobacco related causes annually.

18b. It’s a paradox. Smoking and lung cancer are the perfect example of the power of epidemiologic evidence to bring about important social change, AND the perfect example of the inadequacy of data to bring about important social change.

Matthew Myers, President of The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids” during his keynote address to a special meeting of the Young Epidemiology Scholars group published in our June issue.

19. “Not every opinion deserves equal ink or bandwidth”

Comment included in the conference planning documents introducing the University of Wisconsin meeting on Science Denialism published in our September issue.

20. “Our policies should be based on the best science available and developed with transparency and public participation.”

Barack Obama in response to questions on science and public policy posed to both presidential candidates in the 2012 election.

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