Abdel Omran

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• Notes on Contributors - Abdel R. Omran
  
  Milbank Q. 2005; 83(4): 897–907. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0009.2005.00416.x, PMCID: PMC2690272
  In celebration of The Milbank Memorial Fund's one-hundredth anniversary, the Milbank Quarterly republished selected articles from past issues that provide insight into the role of both the Fund and its journal in addressing major policy questions for health services and population health for more than eighty years.
  
  These notes on contributors identify the positions each author held when his or her article was first published and significant prior and subsequent positions, when this information could be located
  
  In 1971 Abdel R. Omran was professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His conception of an epidemiologic transition was one of the first attempts to account for the effects of major changes in health services and standards of living on patterns of disease. He also served on the faculty of the George Washington University Department of International Public Health in the School of Public Health and Health Services.
• The Epidemiologic Transition: Changing Patterns of Mortality and Population Dynamics
  Robert E. McKeown, Am J Lifestyle Med. 2009 Jul 1; 3(1 Suppl): 19S–26S.
  Abstract: The epidemiologic transition describes changing patterns of population age distributions, mortality, fertility, life expectancy, and causes of death. A number of critiques of the theory have revealed limitations, including an insufficient account of the role of poverty in determining disease risk and mortality, a failure to distinguish adequately the risk of dying from a given cause or set of causes from the relative contributions of various causes of death to overall mortality, and oversimplification of the transition patterns, which do not fit neatly into either historical periods or geographic locations. Recent developments in epidemiologic methods reveal other limitations. A life course perspective prompts examination of changes in causal pathways across the life span when considering shifts in the age distribution of a population as described by the epidemiologic transition theory. The ecological model assumes multiple levels of determinants acting in complex and interrelated ways, with higher level determinants exhibiting emergent properties. Development, testing, and implementation of innovative approaches to reduce the risks associated with the sedentary lifestyle and hyper nutrition in developed countries should not overshadow the continuing threat from infectious diseases, especially resistant strains or newly encountered agents. Interventions must fit populations and the threats to health they experience, while anticipating changes that will emerge with success in some areas. This will require new ways of thinking that go beyond the epidemiologic transition theory.
• The epidemiologic transition theory revisited thirty years later
  Abdel R. Omran. World Health Statistics Quarterly, 53 (‎2, 3, 4)‎, 99 - 119. World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/330604
• The Theory of Epidemiologic Transition: the Origins of a Citation Classic
  George Weisz and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2009;65(3):287- ABSTRACT In 1971 Abdel R. Omran published his classic paper on the theory of epidemiologic transition. By the mid-1990s, it had become something of a citation classic and was understood as a theoretical statement about the shift from infectious to chronic diseases that supposedly accompanies modernization. However, Omran himself was not directly concerned with the rise of chronic disease; his theory was in fact closely tied to efforts to accelerate fertility decline through health-oriented population control programs. This article uses Omran’s extensive published writings as well as primary and secondary sources on population and family planning to place Omran’s career in context and reinterpret his theory. We find that “epidemiologic transition” was part of a broader effort to reorient American and international health institutions towards the pervasive population control agenda of the 1960s and 1970s. The theory was integral to the WHO’s then controversial efforts to align family planning with health services, as well as to Omran’s unsuccessful attempt to create a new sub-discipline of “population epidemiology.” However, Omran’s theory failed to displace demographic transition theory as the guiding framework for population control. It was mostly overlooked until the early 1990s, when it belatedly became associated with the rise of chronic disease.
• UNC Archival Materials
  References to relevant materials for Abdel Omran in the Wilson Library Special Collections at UNC Chapel Hill.