Day

Today is World book and copyright day. UN mentions a lot about books and the diversity of values they bring along but very few words are written on copyright per se. It’s true that books are vectors of values and knowledge, depositories of the intangible heritage. But in a world progressively going towards digital books, it could be worth having a real debate about what type of knowledge we want to preserve for the next generations, in which formats, under what types of conditions. ...

Today, 11th of July 2011, is World Population Day. For that occasion, and as the world population is expected to surpass 7 billion this year, the UNFPA is launching a new campaign: 7 billion people - 7 billion actions. They highlight 7 key issues to explore: Poverty and inequality: reducing poverty and inequality also slows population growth. Women and girls: unleashing the power of women and girls will accelerate progress on all fronts. Young people: energetic and open to new technologies, history’s largest and most interconnected population of young people is transforming global politics and culture. Reproductive health and rights: ensuring that every child is wanted and every childbirth safe leads to smaller and stronger families. Environment: all 7 billion of us, and those who will follow, depend on the health of our planet. Ageing: lower fertility and longer lives add up to a new challenge worldwide: providing for aging populations. Urbanization: the next two billion people will live in cities, so we need to plan for them now. These issues are not new. They are not even original: most bodies or meetings looking at issues for the future have approximately the same issues. But at least it’s another initiative to raise awareness, to think about them. And, most importantly, to act to tackle them. ...

TB stands for tuberculosis. It’s an infectious bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which most commonly affects the lungs. It is transmitted from person to person via droplets from the throat and lungs of people with the active respiratory disease. Like all other World Days regarding infectious diseases, it is meant to raise awareness about its global epidemiological aspects and the efforts to eliminate it. For tuberculosis, March 24th was chosen because Robert Koch first described Mycobacterium tuberculosis on March 24th, 1882. He then received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this in 1905. ...

I continue in the serie of “World x Day” and for a reason still unknown even to myself, I thought today was the World Epilepsy Day (it’s in fact on March 26th, called Purple Day). But, anyway, epilepsy is “a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. […] Epilepsy is usually controlled, but cannot be cured with medication, although surgery may be considered in difficult cases.” ( Wikipedia). Out of curiosity, I was looking for mathematical models for the description of the epidemiology of epilepsy. But unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything. Probably because epilepsy is not an infectious disease for which tentative mathematical models have more predictive power (in terms of the population scale and time scale). The epidemiology of noninfectious diseases is primarily a study of risk factors associated with the chance of developing the disease. Nothing very fancy for a mathemarical model! ;-) (But if you find something, feel free to share! Thanks in advance!) ...

It doesn’t seem jolly but last Friday, it was the World Cancer Day. About this, the WHO set up a nice website about cancer control. Following my previous post on Jamie Oliver and the top 15 causes of death in the USA, I started to collect similar data from other countries. Linking this to cancers, the annual statistics on cancers in Belgium can be found on the Belgian Cancer Registry. The latest numbers are however from 2006. Here are the top 15 cancers in Belgium in 2006 (all sexes and regions mixed): ...

Today was World Leprosy Day. Leprosy has a high incidence in countries like India, Brazil and Burma (and other countries in the middle of Africa). But its incidence in occidental countries is rather low. This may explain why there isn’t a lot of [epidemiological models of leprosy](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=leprosy epidemiological model) (I wish I had some time for this kind of thing).

This 25th of March, 2009 is Document Freedom Day. Although it’s not as important as starvation in parts of the world, the economic crisis or the continuous deterioration of our privacy and civil rights (in UK and elsewhere), it’s good to take a break and think about our use of electronic documents in our everyday live. Let me just give you an example … A few days ago, I was trying to retrieve data from an experiment. As a well-formatted student, I stored my data in a then state-of-the-art, proprietary statistical software my dear statistical professor taught me to use. As long as I had this software, it was fine. Now that my university stopped to pay the license, that I didn’t installed this software on my new computer, I am stuck with a serie of 1, 0 and other delirious characters in that file. Does that mean I lost all my data? Yes. ...