Reply #99: Faculty/Staff Ronald D. Stall, PhD, MPH

[struggle4progress]

Professor and Chair
Graduate School of Public Health
208 Parran Hall
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
The primary focus of my research has been in HIV prevention and behavioral epidemiology, both in the United States and abroad. I also have conducted numerous research projects in the areas of substance abuse epidemiology, smoking, aging, mental health, and housing as health care. Although a great deal of my research has been conducted among gay men, I also have worked with other populations at high risk of HIV infection ... I am a member of the National Institutes of Health study section titled Behavioral and Social Science Approaches to Preventing HIV/AIDS. I sit on the following journal editorial boards: Social Aspects of AIDS (1990-); AIDS Education and Prevention (1992--), AIDS Care (1995-) and review papers for approximately 20 other peer reviewed journals. I serve on the Persad Board, which is a Pittsburgh-based community-based organization whose mission is to meet the health needs of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Communities ... http://www.bchs.pitt.edu/fac_staff/stall.html

Not having read any of his papers, I don't know what his model looks like -- but he'd be laughed out of any epidemiological discussion if he just drew exponential curves. We live in an era of teraflop machines: I expect epidemiologists are perfectly capable of large population computer simulations which reflect a variety of behaviors for subpopulations. If you know a language like C, learn a bit about simulating random variables, and can get good estimates for the infection risks and frequency of various human sexual behaviors for several dozen subpopulations (age, education level, access to health care, etc), you can probably write a multiyear simulation yourself that you could run on a desktop to see what happens in a population of a few hundred thousand or a million. The results probably can't be summarized well by single numbers: the size of the various sexually-interconnected networks will vary, and a few of the networks may be quite large