Examinons d'abord les outils permettant de prendre la dimension de la pandémie du sida. Le Sida apparaît comme une maladie urbaine qui diffuse ensuite dans le monde rural. Typée géographiquement, l'infection à VIH touche différemment les populations selon l'âge et selon le sexe. De même que le Sida a en Afrique un mode de transmission distinct de c...
Published in Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
The influenza pandemic swept through the Caribbean during the period October 1918 to March 1919 and resulted in c.100,000 deaths. This article focuses on the British possessions and is based principally on official reports and the local press. It looks at how the virus entered and spread through the region, the possible reasons for variations in le...
Cassava mosaic disease (CMD), now known to be caused by cassava mosaic geminiviruses (Family Geminiviridae; Genus Begomovirus), was first reported in East Africa in 1894. Epidemics occurred in Madagascar and Uganda in the 1930s and 1940s, and more localised rapid spread of CMD was observed in parts of coastal Tanzania in the 1930s and coastal Kenya...
The coronavirus is dominating the news. Media worldwide have little space to spare for news unrelated to the current pandemic. Few have probably heard of the category 5 Tropical Cyclone Harold that hit Vanuatu on 6 April and brought widespread damage—only five years after the country suffered from Tropical Cyclone Pam, the strongest cyclone on reco...
The world is currently experiencing an extremely serious health crisis. Half of the world’s population is being confined in an attempt to stem the spread of Covid-19, a highly contagious and deadly disease that has so far been fatal to the oldest and most fragile among us. The CERI, also in full confinement, publishes a Dossier on the health crisis...
Published in Molecular Diagnosis
Influenza viruses continually circulate and cause yearly epidemics, which kill 20,000 people in an average year in the United States. Occasionally and unpredictably, pandemic influenza strains sweep the world, infecting 20% to 40% of the world’s population in a single year. In 1918, the worst influenza pandemic on record caused 675,000 deaths in th...
Published in Occupational medicine (Oxford, England)
Influenza remains a globally important cause of febrile respiratory illness. Influenza virus activity in the community results in significant mortality, morbidity and economic disruption, particularly in those at high risk of developing complications, such as the elderly and those with underlying chronic medical conditions, including pulmonary dise...
As a social scientist carrying out field work in the Arabian Peninsula, I am used to navigating between periods of seclusion, and others of intense social contact with colleagues, informants or interviewees. By all standards, working on my own in my Omani air conditioned home office for the last month and a half has not been a traumatizing experien...
Published in International journal of hygiene and environmental health
The plague is an infectious bacterial disease having a high fatality rate without treatment. It has occurred in three huge pandemics since the 6th century with millions of deaths and numerous smaller epidemics and sporadic cases. Referring to specific clinical symptoms of pulmonary plague the disease became known as the Black Death. This pandemic p...
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) moved into humans from a reservoir species and subsequently caused an epidemic in its new host. We know little about the processes that allowed the cross-species transfer of this previously unknown virus. I discuss what we have learned about the movement of viruses into humans from studies of...
