Mortality Tracker: the COVID-19 case for real time web APIs as epidemiology commons.

MOTIVATION: Mortality Tracker is an in-browser application for data wrangling, analysis, dissemination and visualization of public time series of mortality in the United States. It was developed in response to requests by epidemiologists for portable real time assessment of the effect of COVID-19 on other causes of death and all-cause mortality. This is performed by comparing 2020 real time values with observations from the same week in the previous 5 years, and by enabling the extraction of temporal snapshots of mortality series that facilitate modeling the interdependence between its causes. RESULTS: Our solution employs a scalable 'Data Commons at Web Scale' approach that abstracts all stages of the data cycle as in-browser components. Specifically, the data wrangling computation, not just the orchestration of data retrieval, takes place in the browser, without any requirement to download or install software. This approach, where operations that would normally be computed server-side are mapped to in-browser SDKs, is sometimes loosely described as Web APIs, a designation adopted here. AVAILABILITYAND IMPLEMENTATION: https://episphere.github.io/mortalitytracker; webcast demo: youtu.be/ZsvCe7cZzLo. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

IARC monographs: 40 years of evaluating carcinogenic hazards to humans.

BACKGROUND: Recently, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Programme for the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans has been criticized for several of its evaluations, and also for the approach used to perform these evaluations. Some critics have claimed that failures of IARC Working Groups to recognize study weaknesses and biases of Working Group members have led to inappropriate classification of a number of agents as carcinogenic to humans. OBJECTIVES: The authors of this Commentary are scientists from various disciplines relevant to the identification and hazard evaluation of human carcinogens. We examined criticisms of the IARC classification process to determine the validity of these concerns. Here, we present the results of that examination, review the history of IARC evaluations, and describe how the IARC evaluations are performed. DISCUSSION: We concluded that these recent criticisms are unconvincing. The procedures employed by IARC to assemble Working Groups of scientists from the various disciplines and the techniques followed to review the literature and perform hazard assessment of various agents provide a balanced evaluation and an appropriate indication of the weight of the evidence. Some disagreement by individual scientists to some evaluations is not evidence of process failure. The review process has been modified over time and will undoubtedly be altered in the future to improve the process. Any process can in theory be improved, and we would support continued review and improvement of the IARC processes. This does not mean, however, that the current procedures are flawed. CONCLUSIONS: The IARC Monographs have made, and continue to make, major contributions to the scientific underpinning for societal actions to improve the public's health.

Variation in the risk of radiation-related contralateral breast cancer by histology and estrogen receptor expression in SEER.

Radiation exposure, particularly at a young age, is an established cause of breast cancer. It is not known whether radiation-related breast cancer risk varies by molecular subtype. We characterized the relative risk (RR) of contralateral breast cancer (CBC) related to radiotherapy by histology and estrogen receptor (ER) status of the CBC in five-year survivors in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database using Poisson regression models adjusted for attained age and calendar year, age at and year of treatment, ER status of the first breast cancer, and disease stage. 205,316 female breast cancer survivors were followed for an average of 10 years from 1973 until 2007, during which time 6924 women developed a subsequent primary invasive breast cancer in the contralateral breast. The overall RR (and 95% confidence interval (CI)) of radiotherapy-related CBC was 1.11 (1.05-1.16). There was no heterogeneity in risk according to histology of the CBC (P > 0.50) for all ages or young age at exposure, but case numbers were small for subtypes other than ductal and lobular carcinomas. Information on ER status was available from 1990 onwards for 3546 CBC cases, of which 2597 (73%) were ER+ and 949 (27%) were ER-. The RRs were 1.10 (1.02-1.19) for ER+ CBC and 1.19 (1.04-1.35) for ER- CBC (P (difference) = 0.33). Among women treated age <35 years, radiation-related risk of CBC was non-significantly elevated for ER- (RR = 1.38, 95% CI: 0.96-1.97) but not for ER+ tumors (RR = 0.80, 95% CI: 0.47-1.35) (P (difference) = 0.09). We did not find clear evidence that radiation-related risk varies by histology or ER status, but our findings, which were the first to examine this question, were suggestive of possible differences by ER status that may merit further investigation.