By Kathleen Struck, MedPage Today
When the Harvard School of Public Health opened its virtual doors last fall to a worldwide student body online, the first course they offered was neither broad nor lofty. But 55,000 students signed up for “Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical and Public Health Research.” In other words, biostatistics and epidemiology, together in one offering (PH207x for those looking in the online course catalog). The free course taught students basic lessons in how to handle variability and associated uncertainty, explained course co-developer Marcello Pagano, PhD, professor of statistical computing at Harvard, who has taught at the school for the past 35 years. “Statistics is at the forefront and the foundation of public health in this country,” said Pagano. The randomized clinical trial has been one of the major advances in medicine in the 20th century, he said, and “is just basic to everything.”
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PublicHealth/37942
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