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Dr Keith Dear MA (Cantab) MSc PhD (Reading) Current Position: Senior Fellow (Biostatistics) Contact Details: (Building 62, ANU map) National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health The Australian National University Canberra, ACT, 0200 Australia T: +61 2 6125 4865 F: +61 2 6125 0740 Email

Associate Professor Keith Dear is a biostatistician with experience in various areas of medical and health research. His primary research interests are in the direct effects on health of air quality in general, and temperature in particular. He was responsible for the analytic input on this topic to the Garnaut Review, providing estimates of excess mortality and morbidity from heat (and cold) across Australia to 2100.  Recent work has involved collaborations with NSW Health, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, and the CSIRO Preventative Health Flagship.

He leads NCEPH's "Air Quality and Health" research stream, which researches health impacts of heat and air quality within NCEPH's broader climate change group. He is a member of Australia's NCCARF-funded Adaptation Research Network for Human Health, and of the CSIRO climate adaptation flagship partnership cluster in "Urbanism, Climate Adaptation and Health Collaboration", and of the Drought, Drying and Rural and Remote Mental Health consortium.

The majority of his research contributions have been in collaborative applications of statistical methods to medical, social and epidemiologic research, especially in cancer clinical trials, mental health epidemiology and environmental epidemiology. He has made contributions to the theory of biostatistics in the fields of meta-analysis, clinical trials and enviromental epidemiology, and to the teaching of statistics through his development of the Surfstat website (surfstat.anu.edu.au) and within the Biostatistics Consortium of Australia (www.bca.edu.au).

Research Interests

• Direct health effects of climate change, especially heat
• The atmospheric environment and health
• Ultraviolet radiation and autoimmune disease
• Statistical methods in environmental health
  

Selected Recent Publications

Bambrick H, Dear K, Woodruff R, Hanigan I, McMichael AJ (2008) The impacts of climate change on three health outcomes: Temperature-related mortality and hospitalisations, salmonellosis and other bacterial gastroenteritis, and population at risk from dengue. Report to the Garnaut Review: http://www.garnautreview.org.au

Raymond J Mullins, Keith BG Dear, Mimi LK Tang. Paediatric peanut allergy trends 1995-2007.  J.Allergy & Clinical  Immunology 2009;123: 689-693.

Stephen J Robson, Woo Syong Tan, Adebayo Adeyemi, Keith B G Dear. Estimating the rate of caesarean section by maternal request: anonymous survey of obstetricians in Australia. Birth 2009; 36(3).

Gillian Heller, Andrew Forbes, Keith Dear, Erica Jobling. Biostatistics @ Distance. The American Statistician 2008; 62(4): 321-328.

Keith Dear, Leitha Scott, Sharon Chambers, Mike Corbett, Doug Taupin. Perception of Colorectal Cancer Risk Does Not Enhance Participation in Screening. Therapeutic Advances in Gastroenterology, 2008; 1: 157-167.

Robyn M Lucas, Anne-Louise Ponsonby, Anthony J McMichael, Ingrid Van der Mei, Caron Chapman, Alan Coulthard, Keith Dear, Terence Dwyer, Trevor Kilpatrick, Michael P Pender, Bruce Taylor, Patricia Valery. Observational analytic studies in multiple sclerosis: controlling bias through study design and conduct. The Australian Multicentre Study of Environment and Immune Function. Multiple Sclerosis, 2007; 13: 827–839.

Ross J, Crisp D, Lambeth L, Griffiths C, Dear K, Emonson D. Antidepressant use and safety in civil aviation: A case-control study of 10 y of Australian data. Aviat Space Environ Med, 2007; 78: 749-755.  Recipient of the Charles Tuttle Award from the American Society of Aerospace Medicine.

AJ McMichael, KBG Dear. (2006) Environment and disease.  In Genes and common diseases – genetics in modern medicine, (ed. Alan Wright and Nicholas Hastie). Cambridge University Press.

Hanigan I, Hall G, Dear KBG. A comparison of methods for calculating population exposure estimates of daily weather for health research. International Journal of Health Geographics, 2006; 5:38.

Dear K, Ranmuthugala G, Kjellstrom T, Skinner C, Hanigan I. Effects of temperature and ozone on daily mortality experienced in France during the August 2003 heat wave. Arch.Env.Occup.Health, 2006; 60(4) 205-212.

Jorm AF, Dear KBG, Burgess NM. Projections of future numbers of dementia cases in Australia with and without prevention. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 2005; 39: 959-963.

Dear K, Holden J, Andrews R, Tatham D. Vaccines for preventing pneumococcal infection in adults (Cochrane Review). In: The Cochrane Library, Issue 1, 2004. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.