This paper explores the relationship between the research for and development of vaccines against global pandemics and insurance. It shows that development in advance of pandemics of a portfolio of effective and government-approved vaccines does have some insurance properties: it requires incurring costs that are certain (the costs of discovering, developing, and testing vaccines) in return for...

Three pandemics have been attributed to plague in the last 1,500 years. Yersinia pestis caused the third, and its DNA was found in human remains from the second. The Antiqua biovar of Y. pestis may have caused the first pandemic; the other two biovars, Medievalis and Orientalis, may have caused the second and third pandemics, respectively. To test this hypothesis, we designed an original genoty...

In today's world, COVID-19 pandemic has affected many organizations. Pandemic issues have created financial and social problems for businesses. Crisis and risk management have a significant impact on reducing consequences of pandemics. Rapid response to risk enhances the performance of organizations in times of crisis. Therefore, a framework to provide risk treatment in a pandemic crisis seems ...

The focus of this special issue is on studying the consequences pandemics and cyber privacy trust both in digital real worlds. In aftermath recent COVID-19 pandemic that has shaken several aspects our lives for almost two years time, preliminary research indicates technological capabilities data have been deployed exploited to contain spread disease may affected people's privacy, sense security...

In April 2009, Mexican, American, and Canadian authorities announced that a novel influenza virus with pandemic potential had been identified in large segments of the population. Within weeks, it became apparent that the world was dealing with the first influenza pandemic in >40 yrs. Despite the unpredictable nature of influenza severity and spread in the pandemics of the 20th century, understa...

In preparing for influenza pandemics, public health agencies stockpile critical medical resources. Determining appropriate quantities and locations for such resources can be challenging, given the considerable uncertainty in the timing and severity of future pandemics. We introduce a method for optimizing stockpiles of mechanical ventilators, which are critical for treating hospitalized influen...

Influenza pandemics and epidemics have apparently occurred since at least the Middle Ages. When pandemics appear, 50% or more of an affected population can be infected in a single year, and the number of deaths caused by influenza can dramatically exceed what is normally expected. Since 1500, there appear to have been 13 or more influenza pandemics. In the past 120 years there were undoubted pa...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) mortality declined in the northern hemisphere over the last 200 years, but peaked during the Russian (1889) and the Spanish (1918) influenza pandemics. We studied the impact of these two pandemics on TB mortality. METHODS We retrieved historic data from mortality registers for the city of Bern and countrywide for Switzerland. We used Poisson regression models to q...

Emerging pandemics threaten global health and economies and are increasing in frequency. Globally coordinated strategies to combat pandemics, similar to current strategies that address climate change, are largely adaptive, in that they attempt to reduce the impact of a pathogen after it has emerged. However, like climate change, mitigation strategies have been developed that include programs to...