Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.

Jh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, a discussion about causality, whether one thing actually causes another.

Dr. Elizabeth Stewart is a Bloomberg professor of American Health and the chair of the

Biostatistics Department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She speaks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about how best to assess causality and why it's so important to cut through

all the noise out there about key questions of public health. Let's listen.

Professor Elizabeth Stewart, it is great to see you. How are you today? I'm great. It's nice to be on again.

So I am recording this from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where you can walk the halls and see a lot of students with furrowed brows studying biostatistics.

You are the chair of biostatistics at our school.

I am, yes, for about a year. It's been great.

Now, sometimes you can hear a student speculating about how important biostatistics is.

I'm going to be honest with you and whether this is a skill they learn in school or something that could really be applicable as they go out into their careers in public health or medicine.

You have a view on that?

You can imagine I do, yes.

I am trained as a statistician and just think sort of data and evidence is crucial for helping us make informed public health decisions.

And so helping students learn the basics of data and evidence and both how to do studies themselves,

but then also how to interpret other studies, I think, is a key part of public health training.

...