Month: December 2024

Four PANSOC-affiliated researchers have just published a new open access paper in BMC Infectious Diseases examining the COVID-19 pandemic in Chiapas, Mexico, a region with a large indigenous population.

Elienai Joaquin-Damas, PANSOC collaborator during the 2022–23 Centre for Advanced Study project on Indigenous Peoples and Pandemics, is the lead author of this study that uses survey data from secondary school students to capture the prevalence of COVID-19 infections, deaths, and vaccine uptake. Centre leader Svenn-Erik Mamelund, postdoc Ben Schneider, and researcher Gerardo Chowell also contributed to the paper.

The study suggests substantial underreporting of COVID-related deaths in Chiapas: while national statistics reported just 212 cases and one death in the municipality of Chamula, which had a population of more than 75,000, 14% of survey respondents reported at least one COVID infection for themselves, and 4.7% reported at least one death in their household. Compounding these findings, at the time of the survey in September-October 2023 almost 80% of respondents had not received a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

The study suggests that despite increased attention to indigenous communities in public health research and practice in recent decades, large disparities remain both in data collection and policies to reduce health inequalities.

While at PANSOC, postdoc Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar co-authored a new preprint systematically reviewing the prevalance of Aedes-borne (mosquito-carried) Arboviral infections in Europe in recent decades.

The authors carried out a registered systematic review of studies that discuss the spread of various diseases transmitted to humans by Aedes mosquitoes in Europe from 2000 to 2023. These diseases, including dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and West Nile virus, pose a substantial and growing threat to public health. The review found that while most cases identified in the literature were travel-related, more than 15% originated in Europe. The overall case fatality rate in the 479 studies reviewed was about 1%. Most of these diseases do not have available treatments or vaccination, which increases the importance of surveillance and prevention policies.

Recent PANSOC postdoc Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar contributed a co-authored chapter during her time with us to the Springer Handbook of Epidemiology on reproducibility in this scientific field.

The authors establish a stepwise framework for epidemiologists to improve reproducibility, which is a topic of increasing interest and relevance in science and metascience. The ten steps discussed cover the entire research process from idea development to paper submission, and in each step the chapter discusses researcher concerns and implementation of the step. The chapter then presents how the use of these steps enhanced the reliability of research using a practical example of epidemiology from the UK.

During her time at PANSOC, postdoc Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar published an article in the Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference providing an explanation of the use of the term “influenza” in English, in contrast to the more common “grippe” of other Indo-European languages.

While most Indo-European languages refer to the disease using some variant of “grippe”, Italian, English, Uralic, and Nordic languages have preferred “influenza” (which has an Italian origin). The authors argue that “influenza” in contrast to “grippe”, sounds sufficiently different from other English words to avoid ambiguity in understanding. They test the linguistic space available for possible terms that could be used to describe influenza and posit that the term selected provided less ambiguity than the terms used in other Indo-European languages.