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Learning Goal: I’m working on a public health writing question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

Hi! Please write a minimum 250 word response to the following dicussion: In the Richmond Times-Dispatch news article the first thing that came to mind was the public reaction to the, at the time, new information that healthy people could potentially be carriers of an incredibly deadly disease. I imagine there must’ve been a social panic or at the very least an increased level of hesitancy towards public activities. Consequently, the recent public health issues cause by COVID-19 demonstrate parallels almost a century after the “Typhoid Mary� incident. A question I did have was how the possibility of “hidden variables� like the case of Mary Mallon influenced the field of epidemiology – having researchers at the time, now aware of healthy carriers, account for their influence on statistical models of disease. In Chapin’s “Dirt, Disease, and the Health Officer� the pragmatic argument of “I would plead with health officers for a more rational perspective in directing their efforts and to devote more attention to the isolation of infectious diseases… and less to the abatement of nuisances� (3) does demonstrate the more refined and growing influence science is having on medicine. Science, in some degree a composition of logic and mathematics, is being employed by Chaplin because although cleanliness does help reduce infection, it does so statistically less than sanitary science does, and it’s not very logical to waste resources pursing the former when the latter is more effective. In Hansen’s “New Images of a New Medicine,� ignoring the analysis and contextualization of each cartoon and drawing, I found that on first impressions it was easy to misinterpret the message of the drawings without the proper explanation. From this I figured that as images are easier to look at than actual reading of the newspaper, it’s understandable why someone from that time might’ve mistaken the intention as I did and would’ve easily been misled to the situation unfolding around the medical field at the time. In the film “Hope – A Red Cross Seal Story� the initial scuff by the banker reminds me of the previous modules Cholera outbreak, and how wealthy individuals believed it was mainly affecting individuals of the low socioeconomic class. In the end the reverse of fortune is an example of one of the unspoken principles of the germ theory of disease: that microorganisms can infect everyone equally, regardless of class or wealth.

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