Emily Petherick

@ozkitsch.bsky.social

I'm genuinely gobsmacked that the Home Office think this is a good idea. How do they envisage "training" technology to verify the age of a young person from (say) Darfur or Iraqi Kurdistan? They might as well get the calipers out and start doing phrenology

I really enjoyed the Woman who knew too much about Alice Stewart who looked at health risks from radiation.

The only problem is that the citations go to papers that don't actually exist.

* New preprint led by Joao Matos & @gscollins.bsky.social

"Critical Appraisal of Fairness Metrics in Clinical Predictive AI"

- Important, rapidly growing area
- But confusion exists
- 62 fairness metrics identified so far
- Better standards & metrics needed for healthcare
arxiv.org/abs/2506.17035

Plenty studies showing that your postcode is a better predictor of your health outcomes than your genome.

The dark ones go brilliantly with Port

“[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of routine opportunities to practice judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.”

Link not working?

Do you work in UK health and care analytics using data to deliver better outcomes for patients?

Why not enter our Florence Nightingale Award supported by @healthfoundation.bsky.social

Enter by 30 April: rss.org.uk/training-eve...

Such a nice example of the potential pitfalls of drawing conclusions from research using routine data without understanding how the data are generated.

How flawed data is leaving the UK in the dark Trouble at the Office for National Statistics means policymakers cannot rely on key economic numbers, including on employment

Big piece on how the UK is not getting the data it needs and how this is affecting policymaking. A key issue seems to be that the shift from surveys to admin data has not worked well as govt departments have not allowed the ONS access to the data it needs
on.ft.com/3WSCN6h

I've just changed to adding the date to the version, I feel like adding the word final exponentially increases the likelihood of it not being final 😂

Please check the @ises-epi.bsky.social announcement for the 2025 Call for Awards to recognize the work of doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career researchers in social epidemiology. Deadline is April 30, 2025. #PublicHealth #EpiSky #SocialEpi #SDoH

Picture of Bradford City Hall - taken from the end of Thornton Road by Betty Longbottom

Picture of Market Street, Bradford by Tim Green

*Free/subsidised place opportunities for NHS and Local Authority colleagues to attend the 2025 Society for Social Medicine and Population Health Annual Conference in Bradford (10-12 Sept)*

10 to those in the Bradford district; 10 from elsewhere in the UK and Ireland.

Apply here: bit.ly/3FCh8JR

MIT offering travel advice (or rather do not travel advice) for international visitors and green card holders.

If folks at other institutions are receiving similar guidance, please consider sharing here.

Please be as safe as you can.

🚨 NEW: Only a fraction of medical students come from working class backgrounds, despite recent efforts to widen access.

Our new research finds persistent issues with access to careers in medicine, as working-class people remain hugely underrepresented in the profession 🧵⬇️

📢 Are you or someone you know considering a career in the think tank sector?

We're hosting an online webinar for those interested in the sector, aimed particularly at those from under-represented groups.

Find out more and sign up here👇
https://buff.ly/3CYMwky

ACOG Endorsed The following documents have ACOG’s endorsement and are listed in order of endorsed date.

The American College of OB/GYN’s website is now hosting the critical documents purged by the CDC

This is what every professional medical organization should be doing right now

#MedSky

www.acog.org/clinical/cli...

An anonymous person at the CDC just archived all the public CDC datasets as of 1/28 and uploaded it to archive.org

CDC purges STD and vaccine recommendations after Trump gender order Health experts say the website purge could result in deaths.

“People will get sick. And, especially in cases like congenital syphilis where you cannot lose a day to treat, babies will die.” The appalling human cost of this insane exercise in gender censorship mustn’t be forgotten.

www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-std...

If you post a paper on SocArXiv, and then your authoritarian employer demands that you change certain words, of course you can post a revised version - but the original version will be preserved and remain available. FYI.

📌

Here's the research paper with @matthewjcull.bsky.social and @fionawoollard.bsky.social that takes applied philosophy of language to gender inclusion in pregnancy and birth and shows how it CAN be done well. You just need a toolbox of linguistic strategies!
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

@inesvarelasilva.bsky.social

Healthy food costs more than double less healthy options, analysis says Low-income families are being priced out of being able to afford to eat healthily, a charity warns.

"The Food Foundation found that 1,000 calories of healthy food such as fruit and veg costs £8.80, compared to £4.30 for the equivalent amount of less healthy food, such as ready meals and processed meats."

Your health is shaped by what you AFFORD to eat.
#PublicHealth
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

An advert for a workshop happening in Manaus City, Brazil, in June 2025. The workshop is on "Quantifying the environmental impact of climate change in the legal amazon and its effects on population health: from the local to national level"

*Early Career Researchers*

Prof Alastair Leyland at the University of Glasgow has shared a workshop on the environmental impact of climate change in the Amazon and its effect on population health happening in June 2025 in Brazil.

More information and apply at lnkd.in/g4D8bk5a

Deadline 07/02/25