33 questions · 25 almanac · 0 findings

Public Health

Population-level health, prevention, and policy.

Almanac Four Steps to Prove a Germ Guilty
  • How deadly was tuberculosis in Europe at the time Koch identified its cause?
  • What laboratory techniques did Koch develop that are still used in microbiology today?
Almanac The Louse That Carried Typhus
  • Why did understanding the louse as vector turn typhus from an act of fate into a manageable hygiene problem?
Almanac The Body's Own Breathing Dial
  • In what ways did Heymans's mapping of peripheral chemoreception influence modern anaesthesia and intensive care?
Almanac The Culprit Was in the Air Conditioning
  • Why was the bacterium able to spread through the hotel's air-conditioning system undetected?
  • How widespread is Legionella pneumophila in modern engineered water systems like cooling towers and plumbing?
Almanac A Case Study Nobody Requested
  • Why does the medical literature require documentation of unusual transmission cases, even ones that seem more comic than clinical?
Almanac Cataloguing Whatever the Patient Brought It In
  • What range of household containers did Arvid Vatle document patients using for urine samples?
  • Where was Vatle's study of sample containers published, and what field did it fall under?
  • What did Vatle propose the choice of sample container might reveal about a patient?
Almanac A Nation Read Through Its Doughnut Shops
  • How did the doughnut shop become a Canadian civic institution over the second half of the twentieth century?
  • What scholarly methods did Penfold borrow from the study of churches and trade unions to analyse doughnut shops?
Almanac A Danger Nobody Was Willing to Name
  • What did the study 'The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow' actually document?
  • What typically caused the ceramic lavatories in the study to fail?
  • Why does the entry argue this kind of undignified hazard gets overlooked by safety literature?
Almanac A Bra That Becomes Two Gas Masks
  • How does Elena Bodnar's convertible brassiere function as an emergency respiratory mask?
  • Why did the invention receive renewed attention after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster?