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Sheila Bird

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dame Sheila Bird
DBE FRSE FMedSci
Photograph of Dr Sheila Bird
Born
Sheila Macdonald Bird

(1952-05-18) 18 May 1952 (age 74)
Inverness, Scotland
Alma materUniversity of Aberdeen
Known forStatistical thinking at the interface of public health and other jurisdictions.
SpouseDr A Graham Bird (deceased)[1]
AwardsDBE

FRSE
[[Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences|FMedSci
DSc (Hon. Edin.)

Royal Statistical Society medals (Guy bronze, 1989;Bradford Hill, 2000; Chambers, 2010; Howard, 2015).[2]
Scientific career
FieldsBiostatistics
InstitutionsMedical Research Council
University of Strathclyde
University of Edinburgh

Dame Sheila Macdonald Bird DBE FRSE FMedSci (née Gore; born 18 May 1952) [3] 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.[4] 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 Salivary HIV (WASH) surveillance studies in prisons.[5]

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.[6]

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.[7][8][9][10] Bird introduced the Royal Statistical Society’s statistical seminars for journalists and awards for statistical excellence in journalism. She is the first statistician to have been awarded four medals by the Royal Statistical Society (Guy bronze, 1989; Austin Bradford Hill, 2000; Chambers, 2010, Howard, 2015).[7][11]

Early life and education

[edit]

Bird was born in Inverness, Scotland on 18 May 1952 to Isabella Agnes Gordon (née Macdonald) and Herbert Gore.[12] She was educated at Elgin Academy in Scotland, where the mathematics master, Lewis Grant, introduced her to statistics.[13] She graduated with a joint-honours in mathematics and statistics from the University of Aberdeen. From 1974-1976 she was a research assistant in medical statistics at the University of Edinburgh where she, Jones and Rytter quantified the misuse of statistics in the BMJ. In his editorial, Stephen Lock "took on the chin" their 1977 paper and championed statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Doctoral work followed, begun at the University of Edinburgh and supervised by Stuart Pocock, on the analysis of survival in breast cancer which Bird undertook part-time during a lectureship in statistics at the University of Aberdeen (1976–80) before joining the Medical Research Council's Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge in 1980.[14]

Career

[edit]

Bird worked for the Medical Research Council (MRC), as Programme Leader at their Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge.[14]

Publication of Bird's 23 articles on ‘Statistics in Question’ in the BMJ led to her running World Health Organization (WHO) workshops on research methods in diarrhoeal diseases for Third World paediatricians, through which she and Dilip Mahalanabis designed and piloted a clinical record-form which was subsequently adopted for all WHO-funded randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of oral rehydration solutions (ORS).[15] The common record facilitated a subsequent exploratory analysis of individual patient data by Bird and Fontaine. This suggested benefit from lower osmolarity solutions, which was then formally tested in a series of RCTs with global change to low osmolarity ORS adopted in 2001.

Back in Cambridge, Bird worked with paediatrician Dr Colin Morley on the British Randomised Evaluation of ALEC Therapy (BREATHE), the first RCT to demonstrate a one-third reduced mortality in very premature babies by administration at birth of artificial surfactant. ALEC (artificial lung expanding compound) was named for Alec Bangham FRS, who developed it. Non-Cambridge neonatologists’ prior belief was elicited by ‘trial roulette’ and had centred on a one quarter-reduction, the effect-size that BREATHE was powered to detect.[16]

Work on transplantation statistics in the 1980s with Gilks and Bradley led to beneficial matching being adopted as the basis of UK's exchange of cadaveric donor kidneys. To estimate the potential for cadaveric solid organ donation from brainstem-dead donors, Bird designed UK's first confidential audit of all deaths in intensive care units which revealed that relatives’ refusal –rate (then 30%, since risen to 40%), not doctors’ failure to ask, was the fundamental problem.[17]

Bird led the MRC Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland (MRC-BIAS, 1990–1996), which included projection of Scotland's cases of severe immunodeficiency (so-called CD200 cases) and HIV epidemiological studies in prisons, both with co-investigator, clinical immunologist Dr A. Graham Bird.[18]

Bird's work at the interface of public health and other jurisdictions continued. A series of record-linkage studies in Scotland on the late sequelae of Hepatitis C virus infection (with Hutchinson and Goldberg) and on the high risk of drugs-related death soon after prison-release (or after hospital-discharge for drug-treatment clients) followed.[7] With Cooper, she estimated UK's dietary exposure to BSE by birth-cohort and they deduced lower susceptibility to vCJD-progression from dietary BSE exposure at older ages. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance at (with genotyping) abattoirs for late-stage transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep.[19]

Bird served on five working parties of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS): Counting with Confidence, Statistics and Statisticians in Drug Regulation, Performance Monitoring in the Public Services (as chair) and Statistical Issues in First-in-Man Studies.[20] As RSS's vice-president for external affairs (2005–09), Bird introduced statistical seminars for journalists and the RSS's awards for statistical excellence in journalism; and supported Straight Statistics by contributing over 100 articles, many on H1N1 pandemic influenza, others based on her 20-weekly reporting with Colonel Clive Fairweather on military fatality-rates in Iraq and Afghanistan by nationality and cause. Bird led the RSS's campaign for legislation to end the late registration of inquest deaths in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.[7]

With Parmar and Strang, Bird designed the MRC-funded pilot Naloxone Investigation (N-ALIVE) of naloxone-on-release for prisoners in England with a history of heroin injection, which was then the largest randomized controlled trial in prisons in Europe[21]. She also designed the powerful before/after evaluation of Scotland’s National Naloxone Policy which demonstrated effectiveness within 3 years[22].

Bird demitted office from MRC Biostatistics Unit on St Andrews Day (30 November) 2015. Her record-linkage work continued on the mortality of Scotland’s methadone client cohort with particular focus on those whose daily dose of prescribed methadone was in the top quintile (90+ mg/ml)[23]. She served on the Royal Statistical Society’s COVID-19 Taskforce and contributed posts for press and public understanding about the pandemic to the Science Media Centre.

From 2019-2024, Bird was a member of the Statistics Expert Group to the Infected Blood Inquiry and continued contributing to their record-linkage work during the pandemic. With Spiegelhalter, she co-directed, and was cross-examined on, the work underlying the final Report in 2022 from the Statistics Expert Group[24], which entailed extensive statistical analysis and modelling.[25]

Honours and awards

[edit]

As Sheila M. Gore, she won the Guy Medal in Bronze in 1989.[26] Bird was appointed OBE in 2011 for services to social statistics.[1] She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012[27] and of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2017.[28] In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.[29] Bird was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to statistics in the King’s Birthday Honours list, June 2026. [30]

Personal life

[edit]

In September 1999 she and Dr A. Graham Bird married. Six weeks after their marriage he was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme and died in January 2000. Up until his death she published under her maiden name, Gore, however since she has published under her married name of Bird, in her husband's honour.[1][31]

References

[edit]
  1. 1 2 3 "Sheila Bird honoured". Straight Statistics. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
  2. ↑ "Achievements – MRC Biostatistics Unit". Mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  3. ↑ "King's Birthday Honours recognise OR and data leaders". www.theorsociety.com. Archived from the original on 3 July 2026. Retrieved 3 July 2026.
  4. ↑ "1980s". Mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  5. ↑ Bird, A G.; Gore, S. M; Hutchinson, S. J; Lewis, S. C; Cameron, S.; Burns, S. (1997). "Harm reduction measures and injecting inside prison versus mandatory drugs testing: Results of a cross sectional anonymous questionnaire survey". BMJ. 315 (7099): 21–4. doi:10.1136/bmj.315.7099.21. PMC 2127021. PMID 9233321.
  6. ↑ Cooper, J.; Bird, S. M. (2003). "Predicting incidence of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from UK dietary exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy for the 1940 to 1969 and post-1969 birth cohorts". International Journal of Epidemiology. 32 (5): 784–91. doi:10.1093/ije/dyg248. PMID 14559750.
  7. 1 2 3 4 "Sheila Bird". Mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  8. ↑ Parmar MK, Strang J, Choo L, Meade AM, Bird SM (2016). "Randomized controlled pilot trial of naloxone-on-release to prevent post-prison opioid overdose deaths". Addiction. 2016 (24 Oct) (3): 502–515. doi:10.1111/add.13668. PMC 5324705. PMID 27776382.
  9. ↑ Bird SM, Strang J, Ashby D, Podmore J, Robertson JR, Welch S, Meade AM, Parmar MK (2017). "External data required timely response by the Trial Steering-Data Monitoring Committee for the NALoxone InVEstigation (N-ALIVE) pilot trial". Contemporary Clinical Trials Communications. 2017, 5: 1–7. doi:10.1016/j.conctc.2017.01.006. PMC 5389338. PMID 28424796.
  10. ↑ Bird SM, McAuley A, Perry S, Hunter C (2016). "Effectiveness of Scotland's National Naloxone Programme for reducing opioid-related deaths: a before (2006-2010) versus after (2011-2013) comparison". Addiction. 111 (5): 883–891. doi:10.1111/add.13265. PMC 4982071. PMID 26642424.
  11. ↑ "Sheila Bird presented with RSS Howard Medal | MRC Biostatistics Unit". www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  12. ↑ "Bird, Sheila Macdonald". Who's who. Oxford University Press. 2017. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U283449.
  13. ↑ LETI Group (30 June 2011). "ISSUU – The Villagers July 2011 by LETI Group". Issuu. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  14. 1 2 "Home Affairs Committee – Drugs: Breaking the CycleWritten evidence submitted by Sheila M Bird OBE MA PhD CStat FFPH, Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge (DP139)". www.parliament.uk. UK Parliament. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
  15. ↑ "News". Umassmedcwm.org. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  16. ↑ Bird, Sheila M. (2013). "Experimental and Epidemic Risks: Matters of Science and Judgement". European Review. 21: S40–S50. doi:10.1017/S1062798713000045.
  17. ↑ Gore, Sheila M.; Gilks, Walter R. (1987). "Exchanging Kidney Transplants". The Lancet. 330 (8557): 507. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(87)91810-1. PMID 2887792. S2CID 39955657.
  18. ↑ "1990s". Mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  19. ↑ Deeks, Jonathan J; Ashby, Deborah; Takwoingi, Yemisi; Perera, Rafael; Evans, Stephen J W; Bird, Sheila M (30 May 2024). "Lessons to be learned from test evaluations during the COVID-19 pandemic: RSS Working Group's Report on Diagnostic Tests". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society. 187 (3): 659–709. doi:10.1093/jrsssa/qnae053. ISSN 0964-1998.
  20. ↑ "Debating Matters – People – Sheila Bird". Debatingmatters.com. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  21. ↑ Parmar, Mahesh K. B.; Strang, John; Choo, Louise; Meade, Angela M.; Bird, Sheila M. (March 2017). "Randomized controlled pilot trial of naloxone-on-release to prevent post-prison opioid overdose deaths: N-ALIVE to prevent opioid deaths post-release". Addiction. 112 (3): 502–515. doi:10.1111/add.13668. PMC 5324705. PMID 27776382.
  22. ↑ Bird, Sheila M.; McAuley, Andrew; Perry, Samantha; Hunter, Carole (May 2016). "Effectiveness of Scotland 's National Naloxone Programme for reducing opioid-related deaths: a before (2006–10) versus after (2011–13) comparison". Addiction. 111 (5): 883–891. doi:10.1111/add.13265. ISSN 0965-2140. PMC 4982071. PMID 26642424.
  23. ↑ Gao, Lu; Robertson, J. Roy; Bird, Sheila M. (February 2021). "Scotland's 2009–2015 methadone-prescription cohort: Quintiles for daily dose of prescribed methadone and risk of methadone-specific death". British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. 87 (2): 652–673. doi:10.1111/bcp.14432. ISSN 0306-5251. PMC 7612180. PMID 32530053.
  24. ↑ Thornton, Jacqui (April 2023). "UK infected blood inquiry releases compensation report". The Lancet. 401 (10384): 1252–1254. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(23)00762-6. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 37062289.
  25. ↑ Hayes, Sarah; McCabe, Ruth; De Angelis, Daniela; Donnelly, Christl A.; Evans, Stephen J. W.; Medley, Graham F.; Spiegelhalter, David J.; Bird, Sheila M. (June 2024). "Modelling hepatitis C infection acquired from blood transfusions in the UK between 1970 and 1991 for the Infected Blood Inquiry". Royal Society Open Science. 11 (6) 231722. Bibcode:2024RSOS...1131722H. doi:10.1098/rsos.231722. ISSN 2054-5703. PMC 11296209. PMID 39100962.
  26. ↑ Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
  27. ↑ "The Royal Society of Edinburgh – 2012 Elected Fellows". Royalsoced.org.uk. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  28. ↑ "Highest percentage of women elected to Academy, as top scientists recognised with Fellowship". Academy of Medical Sciences. 8 May 2017. Retrieved 19 May 2026.
  29. ↑ "Honorary Graduates in 2018". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  30. ↑ Quenault, A. S. (13 June 2026). "Pioneering biostatistician appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire". www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
  31. ↑ Welsh, Ken; Sewell, Herb (26 January 2000). "Graham Bird". the Guardian. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
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