Related Research Articles
A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread 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.
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.
The 1918–1920 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the common misnomer Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in the state of Kansas in the United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
Annie Dodge Wauneka was an influential member of the Navajo Nation as member of the Navajo Nation Council. As a member and three term head of the council's Health and Welfare Committee, she worked to improve the health and education of the Navajo. Wauneka is widely known for her countless efforts to improve health on the Navajo Nation, focusing mostly on the eradication of tuberculosis within her nation. She also authored a dictionary, in which translated English medical terms into the Navajo language. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by Lyndon B. Johnson as well as the Indian Council Fire Achievement Award and the Navajo Medal of Honor. She also received an honorary doctorate in Humanities from the University of New Mexico. In 2000, Wauneka was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Royal Samuel Copeland, a United States Senator from New York from 1923 until 1938, was an academic, homeopathic physician, and politician. He held elected offices in both Michigan and New York.
An influenza pandemic is an epidemic of an influenza virus that spreads across a large region and infects a large proportion of the population. There have been six major influenza epidemics in the last 140 years, with the 1918 flu pandemic being the most severe; this is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of 50–100 million people. The most recent, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, resulted in under 300,000 deaths and is considered relatively mild. These pandemics occur irregularly.
Laurie Garrett is an American science journalist and author. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.
Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun, is a Chinese-Canadian physician, who served as the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) delegating the People's Republic of China from 2006 to 2017. Chan previously served as Director of Health in the Hong Kong Government (1994–2003) and representative of the WHO Director-General for Pandemic Influenza and WHO Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases (2003–2006). In 2014, Forbes ranked her as the 30th most powerful woman in the world. In early 2018 she joined the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
Kirsty Ellen Duncan is a Canadian politician and medical geographer from Ontario, Canada. Duncan has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Toronto riding of Etobicoke North since 2008, and she served as deputy leader of the government in the House of Commons from 2019 to 2021. Duncan has previously served as minister of science and minister of sport and persons with disabilities. She has published a book about her 1998 expedition to uncover the cause of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
Katherine "Kate" L. O'Brien is a Canadian American pediatric infectious disease physician, epidemiologist, and vaccinologist who specializes in the areas of pneumococcal epidemiology, pneumococcal vaccine trials and impact studies, and surveillance for pneumococcal disease. She is also known as an expert in infectious diseases in American Indian populations. O’Brien is currently the Director of the World Health Organization's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals.
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.
Howard Markel is an American physician and medical historian. Markel is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and Director of the University of Michigan's Center for the History of Medicine. He is also a professor of psychiatry, health management and policy, history, and pediatrics and communicable diseases. Markel writes extensively on major topics and figures in the history of medicine and public health.
A health crisis or public health crisis is a difficult situation or complex health system that affects humans in one or more geographic areas, from a particular locality to encompass the entire planet. Health crises generally have significant impacts on community health, loss of life, and on the economy. They may result from disease, industrial processes or poor policy.
Dame Anne Mandall Johnson DBE FMedSci is a British epidemiologist, known for her work in public health, especially the areas of HIV, sexually transmitted infections and infectious diseases.
Max Carl Starkloff was an American physician and the Health Commissioner for St. Louis, Missouri, from 1895 to 1903 and from 1911 to 1933. He is noted for closing all public venues and prohibiting public gatherings of more than 20 people in October 1918 during the 1918 influenza pandemic. His actions are credited as being an early instance in modern medicine of social distancing.
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.
Dorothy Deming (1893–1972) was an American nurse and writer who wrote the 'Penny Marsh' books on public health nursing as a career.
In the waning months of 2022, the first northern hemisphere autumn with the nearly full relaxation of public health precautions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals in the United States and Canada began to see overwhelming numbers of pediatric care patients, primarily driven by a massive upswing in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) cases, but also flu, rhinovirus, enterovirus, and SARS-CoV-2.
References
- ↑ Bristow, Nancy K. (1 November 2015). "Sandra Opdycke, The Flu Epidemic of 1918: America's Experience in the Global Health Crisis". Soc Hist Med. 28 (4): 944–946. doi:10.1093/shm/hkv082 – via shm.oxfordjournals.org.
- ↑ "Sandra Opdycke". goodreads.com. Retrieved 26 January 2017.
