Epidemiologic activists

There's an excellent article in this morning's New York Times on the quest by the Cochrane group to determine the efficacy of Tamiflu, which is part of a bigger story on how pharmaceutical companies selectively release data regarding their products. It demonstrates how epidemiology can involve more than just data analysis and how political activism is sometimes required to find the data to answer basic questions.

Photo: Dr. Tom Jefferson by Chris Warde-Jones for the New York Times.