Sheila Bird
Sheila Macdonald Bird OBE FRSE FMedSci (
Gore; born 18 May 1952) is a Scottish
biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the ''
British Medical Journal'' (''BMJ'') and ''BMJ'' series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to
medical journals. Bird's doctoral work on non-
proportional hazards in
breast cancer found application in
organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the
Medical Research Council (MRC) Biostatistical Initiative in support of
AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance (WASH) studies in prisons. Her work with Cooper on UK dietary
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposure revealed that the 1940–69
birth cohort was the most exposed and implied age-dependency in susceptibility to clinical
vCJD progression from dietary BSE exposure since most vCJD cases were younger, born in 1970–89. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance for
transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep which revolutionised the understanding of
scrapie.
Record linkage studies in Scotland were central to Bird's work (with others) on the late sequelae of Hepatitis C virus infection and on the morbidity and mortality of opioid addiction. Her team first quantified the very high risk of drugs-related death in the fortnight after prison-release, in response to which Bird and Hutchinson proposed a prison-based randomized controlled trial of naloxone, the opioid antagonist, for prisoners-on-release who had a history of heroin injection. Bird introduced the
Royal Statistical Society’s statistical seminars for journalists and awards for statistical excellence in journalism. She is the first female statistician to have been awarded four medals by the Royal Statistical Society (Guy bronze, 1989; Austin Bradford Hill, 2000; Chambers, 2010, Howard, 2015).
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