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This one even says "beneficial agent" in the title:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/76738664...ownload-as-PDF
That article was not a 'public health' topic; I'm not claiming the term 'agent', in scientific papers, is never used in a neutral or positive sense - I'm saying the usage of 'agent' in a public health context is ordinarily as 'a bad thing to be controlled, minimized or eliminated'. Certainly that is how guns appear to be characterized in the paper we are discussing.
Note that I am backing away from my earlier statement of 'uniformly' and 'foreign to the discipline'; I can imagine, say, DDT as an 'agent' to kill mosquitoes and thus control malaria, and 'agent' there would be a positive usage.