kiore

Probably career wise you may find multiple Masters to be more useful than a PhD, but at the stage you are at you probably don't really know how things will pan out, get the Masters out of the way first. You may yet decide that academia suits you (or not). As a side note as to whether it is worth it, people with PhDs live longer on average An interesting read on this is Michael Marmot's The Status Syndrome.

I must say I have concerns re this topic, the average number should you establish it, is a population health statistic, not an individual risk calculation. If we were to establish say that it would take in a given population, 10 'encounters' to contract a sexually transmitted infection, this does not mean you can have 9 and be safe.. Having worked in the field of sexual health for many years I have seen people contract infections (whatever they were) on their first or their hundredth. The individual risk is individual and using population statistics to calculate individual risk is a nonsense. Take life expectancy as an example, we know that Japanese have a longer life expectancy than say Sudanese, but a Japanese individual sitting next to a Sudanese individual in a plane crash has no individual advantage of survival due to their predicted 50% longer life expectancy. A thousand ( or a million) unprotected sexual encounters with uninfected individuals will result in no infection, while a single encounter with an infected individual could.

Well a complex question. May I point out that Malaria related illness kills more than 1 million people every year so actually very harmful, the most lethal parasitic disease in fact: http://www.who.int/f...a/en/index.html Yellow fever has has mortality rate of almost 50% and Dengue fever especially when is classified as Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever is a serious health threat in many regions of the world: http://www.who.int/m...heets/fs117/en/ OK, so back to the OP, a bite from a mosquito that is not a carrier of an infectious disease can still be harmful as it breaks the skin and could allow infection to develop that way also it is not obvious whether a mosquito is carrying malaria etc or not, so avoidance of bites is still the most effective protection. Immunity can develop though exposure to infection, but this is not always the case, vaccination with attenuated or live strains will also either provide or assist with the development of immunity. There however is no current effective vaccine for Malaria or Dengue Fever. Yellow Fever does has an effective vaccine and this has assisted with the control of this deadly disease. Cancer, has a variety of causes and the only current vaccine against cancer is the HPV (human papilloma virus) which offers protection from some forms of cervical cancer.

Greetings, I have just registered so am having a bit of a look around.. Found this site via RationalSkepticism.org so some of you who post there may know me already. Currently working in Africa doing public health sort of stuff. I am a Folding@Home distributed computing fanatic for team Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists so build and overclock etc for fun.

I would also question why.. But if it is just curiosity, well as the phineas gage case has already been mentioned so I will just add that the human brain seems to be able to take significant damage and remain functional in some cases, I have experience with dealing with people who had suffered what you would expect to be immediately lethal projectile and blast injuries where death was anything but assured or fast. In regard to projectiles the point of aim, impact and what that translates to in the projectile pathway and exit can be surprisingly different. I have witnessed a case where 2 12ga shotgun blasts via the roof of the mouth failed to kill or even result in unconsciousness despite effectively shredding the brain and shattering the skull <and other significant injuries> Cause of eventual death was infection.