In this brief contribution I will complement my recent paper on the limitations of ‘modern epidemiology’ 1 which has produced a very critical response in some instances. 2 Part of this response may have arisen from my focus on socioeconomic examples, and I will therefore also include other ‘population level’ examples, including several from asthma research. I focus on ‘public health epidemiology’ (epidemiological methods can be used in other contexts, but I will not consider these here), which is ‘the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events in specified populations, and the application of this study to control of health problems’. 3 I concentrate on the scientific disagreements relating to the first half of this definition, rather than the political/public health disagreements relating to the second half, although the two debates are clearly inter-linked.
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Neil Pearce (1999) studied this question.
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