Influenza pandemics can emerge unexpectedly and wreak global devastation. However, each of the six pandemics since 1889 emerged in the Northern Hemisphere just after the flu season, suggesting that pandemic timing may be predictable. Using a stochastic model fit to seasonal flu surveillance data from the United States, we find that seasonal flu leaves a transient wake of heterosubtypic immunity...

Pandemics and acute emergencies raise pressing medical, ethical and organisational challenges. These include global governance, priority setting, triaging of patients, allocation of scarce resources and restricting individual liberty in the interests of public health. We will focus particularly on an issue of direct relevance to all respiratory team members, i.e. what is the duty of the healthc...

This Special Issue of Global Public Health on Politics & Pandemics brings together 26 articles and commentaries that address diverse aspects the politics COVID-19 related issues. These papers are grouped in six topical areas: theories global health, health systems policies, country responses, social inequalities, science technology. The goal is to give readers a sense range topics have been foc...

Purpose This study aims to draw out the common characteristics of frauds associated with pandemics and identify any risks unique them. Design/methodology/approach It considers range their reporting lags examines what is known about current against individuals, businesses government, principally using public private sector data from Australia UK. Findings The identifies some novel crime types me...

During the surveillance of influenza pandemics, underreported data are a public health challenge that complicates the understanding of pandemic threats and can undermine mitigation efforts. We propose a method to estimate incidence reporting rates at early stages of new influenza pandemics using 2009 pandemic H1N1 as an example. Routine surveillance data and statistics of travellers arriving fr...

Almost all deaths related to current influenza epidemics occur among the elderly. However, mortality was greatest among the young during the 1918-1919 pandemic. This study compared the age distribution of influenza-related deaths in the United States during this century's three influenza A pandemics with that of the following epidemics. Half of influenza-related deaths during the 1968-1969 infl...

From the pandemics of the 19th century to the recent disaster in Goma, Zaire, cholera has left an indelible mark on human and medical history. Cholera pandemics in the 19th and 20th centuries drove the development of epidemiology as a serious science. Cholera has continued to press advances in the concepts of disease ecology, basic membrane biology, and transmembrane signaling and in the applic...