ABSTRACT
As Nancy Krieger (1992), Sylvia Noble Tesh (1988), and others have argued, public health data are not apolitical, and biomedical assertions about the causes of illness and the characterization of symptoms denoting distinct disease entities are not, and have never been, value-free. 1
A first step in understanding the making of public health data is recognizing that the familiar word—“data”—is in fact a deceptive term…. [T]he singular noun “datum” in Latin, literally means “that which is given”… something known or assumed as a fact, and made the basis of reasoning or calculations. As many critics have noted, however, data of any type— including public health data—are not and never have been simply a “given.” No data bases have ever magically arrived…. [I]nstead, their form and content reflect decisions made by individuals and institutions, and in the case of public health data, embody underlying beliefs and values about what it is we need to know in order to understand population patterns of health and disease. In other words, data are a social product, and are neither a gift passively received from an invisible donor nor a neutral collection of allegedly inevitable empirical facts. 2
