occupational health

The annual meetings of the Society for Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiologic Research (SPER) and the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) will take place in Baltimore, Maryland from June 18 to 22, 2018. We will present a scientific poster at each of these meetings. At SPER, Mortality related to cerebral palsy in the United States: Analysis of multiple causes of death and comparison with deaths in the general population from 2005 to 2014 will explore deaths in the US that include cerebral palsy (CP - ICD 10 code G80) as immediate, underlying, or contributing cause, or as an “other condition” of significance mentioned on a death certificate. At the SER meeting, Competing risks survival bias among US astronauts will explore whether deaths due to external causes (primarily accidents, including spacecraft tragedies) among astronauts might be obstructing our view of natural-cause deaths in this occupational cohort.

Background

February 13, 2016 saw the unexpected death of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia was born March 11, 1936, making him just shy of 80 years old at the time of his death. The death of Justice Scalia marks the first death of a US Supreme Court Justice since September of 2005, when Justice William Rehnquist died.

In collabortion with two of our colleagues, we published a paper in the Journal of Insurance Medicine in 2015 about the mortality of US Supreme Court Justices. In that paper we presented results from studying the life and death of all 112 Justices that had served from 1789 through the end of 2013.

In Part 2, I detailed how I gathered individual measurements of equivalent radiation doses for locations in outer space. Here I relate how I converted those measurements into a useful tool to estimate equivalent radiation doses for astronauts on past or future missions.