Recent research has shown that preexisting health condition affected an individual's risk of dying during the 14th-century Black Death. However, a previous study of the effect of adult stature on risk of mortality during the epidemic failed to find a relationship between the two; this result is perhaps surprising given the well-documented inverse association between stature and mortality in hum...

AIM To investigate, with extended follow-up, cause-specific mortality among low-income Black and White Americans with Type 2 diabetes who have similar socio-economic status. METHODS Black and White Americans aged 40-79 years with Type 2 diabetes (n = 12 498) were recruited from community health centres as part of the Southern Community Cohort Study. Multivariable Cox analysis was used to esti...

From AD 1347 to AD 1353, the Black Death killed tens of millions of people in Europe, leaving misery and devastation in its wake, with successive epidemics ravaging the continent until the 18(th) century. The etiology of this disease has remained highly controversial, ranging from claims based on genetics and the historical descriptions of symptoms that it was caused by Yersinia pestis to concl...

The third epidemic, which began at the end of the 19th century in China and reached the rest of the world via Hong Kong, is still ongoing. This summer a man died from plague in the city of Yumen in northern China. 30,000 inhabitants were confined to isolation when parts of the city were locked down. There was a plague outbreak in November in Madagascar, both in the provinces and in the capital ...

This anomaly, though already known has received little attention;1 neither Ziegler nor Gottfried, writing in 1969 and 1983 respectively, questioned the bubonic plague assumption.2 Shrewsbury’s detailed history of bubonic plague in the British Isles in 1971 did little to explore the problems of plague in a cold temperate climate.3 Indeed, so fixed was he upon the rat-flea plague model that he di...

PURPOSE We compared mortality rates among state prisoners and other state residents to identify prisoners' health care needs. METHODS We linked North Carolina prison records with state death records for 1995-2005 to estimate all-cause and cause-specific death rates among black and white male prisoners ages 20-79 years and used standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) to compare these observed dea...

Diabetes is a common chronic disease of childhood affecting approximately 200,000 children and adolescents in the United States (1). Children and adolescents with diabetes are at increased risk for death from acute complications of diabetes, including hypoglycemia and diabetic ketoacidosis (2,3); in 2012, CDC reported that during 1968-2009, diabetes mortality among U.S. persons aged ≤19 years d...