经济学人下载:健康数据与隐私(1)

Science & technology 

科技

Health data and privacy 

健康数据与隐私

The pandemic has sparked a new way to study sensitive medical records 

大流行引发了一种研究敏感病历的新方法

On may 7th an article appeared on medRxiv, an online repository for medical research. 

5月7日，医学研究在线资源库medRxiv上发表了一篇文章。

It showed, for England at least, the degrees to which sars-cov-2, the virus that causes covid-19, discriminates in its deadliness between various groups of people. 

该研究显示，至少对英国来说，covid-19的sars-cov-2病毒在不同人群中的致死率差别有多大。

Men are more likely to die than women. The old and the socially deprived more likely than the young, well-off and well-connected.

男性比女性更容易死亡。老年人和社会贫困人群比年轻人、富人和有良好关系的人更可能死亡。

Those with uncontrolled diabetes or severe asthma, more likely than those without.

糖尿病和严重哮喘患者比没有糖尿病和严重哮喘的患者患病的几率更大。

And members of the country’s ethnic minorities more likely than those of its white majority.

与占人口多数的白人相比，美国的少数民族成员更有可能患病。

None of these, even the first (for men are more vulnerable than women to quite a wide range of infections), is exactly a surprise.

所有这些，甚至是第一点(因为男性比女性更容易受到各种各样的感染)，都不足为奇。

Even the finding that current smokers actually have a lower risk of death from the illness than do non-smokers, though superficially arresting,

吸烟人士死于新冠肺炎的风险低于不吸烟的人，虽然这个发现表面上很引人注目，

is in line with the results of other studies that used different methods—though a possible protective effect on asthma patients of steroid inhalers looks worth following up.

但它也与使用不同方法的其他研究结果一致——尽管吸入类固醇可能对哮喘患者起到保护作用还值得进一步探讨。

But the actual results of this study are not really the remarkable thing about it.

但是这项研究的实际结果并不是其特别之处。

That, according to its lead author Ben Goldacre, a clinician and data scientist at the University of Oxford, is the method of analysis by which they were obtained.

根据该研究的主要作者、牛津大学的临床医生和数据科学家本·戈尔达克尔的说法，其特别之处在于获得这些数据的分析方法。

Instead of extracting sensitive patient records from the databases of the company which manages them on behalf of general practitioners (gps, Britain’s network of family doctors),

该论文背后的团队并没有从代表全科医生(英国家庭医生网络)管理这些数据的公司的数据库中提取敏感的病人记录，

the team behind the paper developed a suite of software that lets them run their massive analysis on the data in situ.

而是开发了一套软件，让他们在现场对数据进行大规模分析。