Education Commons^™

The Battle Against Malaria: A Teachable Moment, Randy K. Schwartz

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Malaria has been humanity’s worst public health problem throughout recorded history. Mathematical methods are needed to understand which factors are relevant to the disease and to develop counter-measures against it. This article and the accompanying exercises provide examples of those methods for use in lower- or upper-level courses dealing with probability, statistics, or population modeling. These can be used to illustrate such concepts as correlation, causation, conditional probability, and independence. The article explains how the apparent link between sickle cell trait and resistance to malaria was first verified in Uganda using the chi-squared probability distribution. It goes on to explain …

Unique Breast Cancer Features Within The Vietnamese Population, Polly Niravath, Melissa Bondy, Susan G. Hilsenbeck

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is known to be a heterogeneous disease across women, and even within individual tumors. However, relatively little is known about heterogeneity across cultures. There has been some evidence to suggest that Asian women are more likely to have HER2+ breast cancer than their Caucasian counterparts.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to further investigate the unique pattern of breast cancer incidence and subtype in the Vietnamese population.

METHODS: We retrospectively collected data on all Vietnamese women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer at the Lester & Sue Smith Breast Center in Houston, Texas over a four year …