Geoffrey Arthur Rose CBE (19 April 1926 – 12 November 1993) was an eminent epidemiologist whose ideas have been credited with transforming the approach to strategies for improving health.
[2] In 1958 he joined the epidemiology department of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and became a part-time Reader in 1964.
[4] It was their assertion that this insight of Rose has profound implications for intervention and prevention strategies, and has been incorporated into research contexts through an understanding of the difference between measures of absolute and relative risk.
For example, to prevent one death due to a motor vehicle accident, many hundreds of people must wear seat belts.
Main strengths of this strategy include: the intervention may be matched to the needs of the individual; it may avoid interference with those who are not at a special risk; it may be accommodated within the ethical and cultural values, organisation, and economics, of the health care system; selectivity may increase the likelihood of a cost-effective use of resources.
Partly in response to this failure, there is a development of individual predictive medicine and a widening of high-risk categories for numerous conditions, that leads to the application of "pseudo-high-risk" prevention strategies.
It was reasserted by Doyle, Furey and Flowers, writing in 2005, that the central messages expounded by Rose remain highly relevant to modern public health policy and practice.