Time for an ecosystem approach to public health? Lessons from two infectious disease outbreaks in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ecosystem approaches recognize the complexity of many contemporary public health challenges and offer an alternative for dealing with problems that have proven intractable and unresponsive to conventional public health strategies. Infectious disease outbreaks are among the most dramatic aspects of systems failure, and the Canadian cases of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in Toronto, and the E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, serve as useful illustrative examples. This paper examines some of the limitations of current public health approaches, the fundamental tenets of an alternative, transdisciplinary ecosystem approach, and changes necessary for implementation, including those in philosophical approach, communications and education, and, finally, institutions and governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".