Related Research Articles
A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has a sudden increase in cases and spreads across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide.
Biosecurity refers to measures aimed at preventing the introduction or spread of harmful organisms intentionally or unintentionally outside their native range or within new environments. In agriculture, these measures are aimed at protecting food crops and livestock from pests, invasive species, and other organisms not conducive to the welfare of the human population. The term includes biological threats to people, including those from pandemic diseases and bioterrorism. The definition has sometimes been broadened to embrace other concepts, and it is used for different purposes in different contexts.
An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic.
Sir Peter Karel, Baron Piot is a Belgian-British microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS.
Flu season is an annually recurring time period characterized by the prevalence of an outbreak of influenza (flu). The season occurs during the cold half of the year in each hemisphere. It takes approximately two days to show symptoms. Influenza activity can sometimes be predicted and even tracked geographically. While the beginning of major flu activity in each season varies by location, in any specific location these minor epidemics usually take about three weeks to reach its pinnacle, and another three weeks to significantly diminish.
Harvey Vernon Fineberg is an American physician. A noted researcher in the fields of health policy and medical decision making, his past research has focused on the process of policy development and implementation, assessment of medical technology, evaluation and use of vaccines, and dissemination of medical innovations. Fineberg has held several prominent positions over the course of his career, including Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, Provost of Harvard University, and President of the Institute of Medicine, now the National Academy of Medicine.
Globalization, the flow of information, goods, capital, and people across political and geographic boundaries, allows infectious diseases to rapidly spread around the world, while also allowing the alleviation of factors such as hunger and poverty, which are key determinants of global health. The spread of diseases across wide geographic scales has increased through history. Early diseases that spread from Asia to Europe were bubonic plague, influenza of various types, and similar infectious diseases.
In public health, social distancing, also called physical distancing, is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions or measures intended to prevent the spread of a contagious disease by maintaining a physical distance between people and reducing the number of times people come into close contact with each other. It usually involves keeping a certain distance from others and avoiding gathering together in large groups.
This is a timeline of influenza, briefly describing major events such as outbreaks, epidemics, pandemics, discoveries and developments of vaccines. In addition to specific year/period-related events, there is the seasonal flu that kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people every year and has claimed between 340 million and 1 billion human lives throughout history.
Simin Liu is an American physician-scientist and epidemiologist. He is recognized internationally for his leadership in the research of nutrition, genetics, epidemiology, and the environmental and biological determinants of complex diseases, particularly those related to cardiometabolic health in diverse populations. His research has pioneered novel concepts, uncovered critical mechanisms and risk factors, and developed research frameworks for diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. A hallmark of Liu's work is when his lab was among the first to define and quantify dietary glycemic load in humans, providing key insights into the functional role of dietary carbohydrates in the development of health outcomes. This novel nutritional concept has since become a cornerstone of clinical diabetes management, nutritional epidemiology, and dietary feeding trials in diverse populations worldwide.
Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. The WHO adopted the placeholder name to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen. Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci stated that the concept of Disease X would encourage WHO projects to focus their research efforts on entire classes of viruses, instead of just individual strains, thus improving WHO capability to respond to unforeseen strains. In 2020, experts, including some of the WHO's own expert advisors, speculated that COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain, met the requirements to be the first Disease X.
Dan Hung Barouch is an American physician, immunologist, and virologist. He is known for his work on the pathogenesis and immunology of viral infections and the development of vaccine strategies for global infectious diseases. He was named the founding director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and is a founding member and a steering committee member at the Ragon Institute.
The Stop Mandatory Vaccination website and associated Facebook group are some of the major hubs of the American anti-vaccination movement. It was established by anti-vaccination activist Larry Cook in 2015.
Maimuna (Maia) Majumder is a computational epidemiologist and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital's Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP).
The 1957–1958 Asian flu pandemic was a global pandemic of influenza A virus subtype H2N2 that originated in Guizhou in Southern China. The number of excess deaths caused by the pandemic is estimated to be 1–4 million around the world, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. A decade later, a reassorted viral strain H3N2 further caused the Hong Kong flu pandemic (1968–1969).
Planning and preparing for pandemics has happened in countries and international organizations. The World Health Organization writes recommendations and guidelines, though there is no sustained mechanism to review countries' preparedness for epidemics and their rapid response abilities. National action depends on national governments. In 2005–2006, before the 2009 swine flu pandemic and during the decade following it, the governments in the United States, France, UK, and others managed strategic health equipment stocks, but they often reduced stocks after the 2009 pandemic in order to reduce costs.
Sotiris Tsiodras is a Greek internal medicine physician, specializing in infectiology, in charge of Greece's management of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 crisis.
Sylvie Champaloux Briand is a French physician who is Director of the Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department at the World Health Organization. Briand led the Global Influenza Programme during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Briand launched the WHO Information Network for Epidemics which looked to counter the spread of COVID-19 misinformation.
Megan Blanche Murray is an American epidemiologist and an infectious disease physician. She is the Ronda Stryker and William Johnston Professor of Global Health in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Abraar Karan is an American global health physician and researcher. He was active in the COVID-19 epidemic response in Massachusetts and involved nationally through his contributions to lay press media platforms. He is a columnist at the British Medical Journal, a contributor at the National Public Radio, and regularly writes in the lay press.
References
- 1 2 3 4 Spinney, Laura (1 March 2020). "Epidemics expert Jonathan Quick: 'The worst-case scenario for coronavirus is likely'". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved 2020-03-01– via www.theguardian.com.
- ↑ MacKenzie, Debora. "The End of Epidemics: It's all about the money". New Scientist. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
- ↑ Wadman, Meredith (30 January 2018). "Review: How to Achieve 'The End of Epidemics'". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660 . Retrieved 2020-03-01– via www.wsj.com.
- 1 2 3 "Jonathan Quick". WHO. Archived from the original on October 21, 2014. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
- ↑ "January 2018". globalhealth.harvard.edu. Archived from the original on 2020-03-01. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
- ↑ "A century ago, the Spanish flu killed 100 million people. Is a new pandemic on the way?". www.newstatesman.com. 21 April 2018. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
- ↑ "Jonathan D. Quick". Duke Global Health Institute. Archived from the original on 2020-03-01. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
- ↑ "WHO | Jonathan Quick". Archived from the original on October 21, 2014.
