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"Pandemics History."
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Appalachian epidemics : from smallpox to COVID-19
\"As the COVID-19 virus swept across the nation in spring 2020, infection and hospitalization rates in states like West Virginia remained relatively low. By that July, each of Appalachia's 423 counties had recorded confirmed cases. The coronavirus pandemic has taken an enormous toll on the health of individuals and institutions throughout the region-a stark reminder that even isolated rural populations are subject to historical, biological, ecological, and geographical factors that have continually created epidemics over the past millennia. In Appalachian Epidemics: From Smallpox to COVID-19, scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds assess two centuries of public health emergencies and their subsequent responses. This volume peers into the trans-Appalachian South's experience with illness, challenging the misconception that rurality provides protection against maladies. In addition to surveying the impact of influenza, polio, and Lyme disease outbreaks, Appalachian Epidemics addresses the less-understood social determinants of health. The effects of the opioid crisis and industrial coal mining complicate the definition of disease and illuminate avenues for responding to future public health threats. From the significance of regional stereotypes to the spread of misinformation and the impact of racism and poverty on public health policy, Appalachian Epidemics makes clear that many of the natural, political, and socioeconomic forces currently shaping the region's experiences with COVID-19 and other crises have historical antecedents\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Escaping Pandora’s Box — Another Novel Coronavirus
With luck, public health control measures may be able to put the Covid-19 demons back in the jar. If they do not, we face a daunting challenge equal to, or perhaps greater than, that posed by the influenza pandemic of a century ago.
Journal Article
The pandemic century : one hundred years of panic, hysteria and hubris
Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From pneumonic plague in LA and `parrot fever' in Argentina to the more recent AIDS, SARS and Ebola epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated outbreaks and scares. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. The Pandemic Century exposes the limits of science against nature, and how these crises are shaped by humans as much as microbes.
Book
The Physician’s Duty to Treat During Pandemics
Physicians assume a primary ethical duty to place the welfare of their patients above their own interests. Thus, for example, physicians must not exploit the patient–physician relationship for personal financial gain through the practice of self-referral. But how far does the duty to patient welfare extend? Must physicians assume a serious risk to their own health to ensure that patients receive needed care? In the past, physicians were expected to provide care during pandemics without regard to the risk to their own health. In recent decades, however, the duty to treat during pandemics has suffered from erosion even while the risks to physicians from meeting the duty has gone down. After exploring the historical evolution of the duty to treat and the reasons for the duty, I conclude that restoring a strong duty to treat would protect patient welfare without subjecting physicians to undue health risks.
Journal Article
Viral pandemics : from smallpox to COVID-19 & Mpox
Written by a public health practitioner and a medical historian, 'Viral Pandemics' explores the terrifying world of viruses as the cause of all acute pandemics since 1900, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
BOOK
An ancient influenza genome from Switzerland allows deeper insights into host adaptation during the 1918 flu pandemic in Europe
Background
From 1918 to 1920, the largest influenza A virus (IAV) pandemic known to date spread globally causing between 20 to 100 million deaths. Historical records have captured critical aspects of the disease dynamics, such as the occurrence and severity of the pandemic waves. Yet, other important pieces of information such as the mutations that allowed the virus to adapt to its new host can only be obtained from IAV genomes. The analysis of specimens collected during the pandemic and still preserved in historical pathology collections can significantly contribute to a better understanding of its course. However, efficient RNA processing protocols are required to work with such specimens.
Results
Here, we describe an alternative protocol for efficient ancient RNA sequencing and evaluate its performance on historical samples, including a published positive control. The phenol/chloroform-free protocol efficiently recovers ancient viral RNA, especially small fragments, and maintains information about RNA fragment directionality through incorporating fragments by a ligation-based approach. One of the assessed historical samples allowed for the recovery of the first 1918 IAV genome from Switzerland. This genome, derived from a patient deceased during the beginning of the first pandemic wave in Switzerland, already harbours mutations linked to human adaptation.
Conclusion
We introduce an alternative, efficient workflow for ancient RNA recovery from formalin-fixed wet specimens. We also present the first precisely dated and complete influenza genome from Europe, highlighting the early occurrence of mutations associated with adaptation to humans during the first European wave of the 1918 pandemic.
Journal Article
How History of Medicine Helps Us Understand COVID-19 Challenges
History has informed much of the social and political response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, most notably in decisions about having people shelter in place and donning masks, as well as when and how to ease quarantine restrictions. When confronting the uncertainty of controlling the spread of a novel disease, these actions rely on information about the management of past pandemics to estimate their potential effectiveness as public health interventions. For example, during the current COVID-19 pandemic, public health decision makers in San Francisco reflected on the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic in the city, which offered evidence of the risks of relaxing measures too soon, after an apparent flattening of the curve, offering insight into the limits of public tolerance for social interventions and the political and economic pressures to return to normal.1 In addition, history exposes long-term structural inequities that create barriers to health care access, foster community distrust in public health ordinances, and result in worse health outcomes for vulnerable populations (eg, people who are low income, African American, and older) compared with non-vulnerable populations (eg, people who are high income, White, and younger). In this commentary, we examine the role that historical investigation plays in rationalizing public health interventions and helping to understand the public response to pandemic controls.
Journal Article
The human disease : how we create pandemics, from our bodies to our beliefs
\"The COVID pandemic won't be our last because what makes us human also makes us vulnerable to pandemics; as this book explains, though, if we are the problem, then we're also the solution\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Justinianic Plague
Existing mortality estimates assert that the Justinianic Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE) caused tens of millions of deaths throughout the Mediterranean world and Europe, helping to end antiquity and start the Middle Ages. In this article, we argue that this paradigm does not fit the evidence. We examine a series of independent quantitative and qualitative datasets that are directly or indirectly linked to demographic and economic trends during this two-century period: Written sources, legislation, coinage, papyri, inscriptions, pollen, ancient DNA, and mortuary archaeology. Individually or together, they fail to support the maximalist paradigm: None has a clear independent link to plague outbreaks and none supports maximalist reconstructions of late antique plague. Instead of large-scale, disruptive mortality, when contextualized and examined together, the datasets suggest continuity across the plague period. Although demographic, economic, and political changes continued between the 6th and 8th centuries, the evidence does not support the now commonplace claim that the Justinianic Plague was a primary causal factor of them.
Journal Article