Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC)
An OsloMet Centre of Research Excellence studying the societal aspects of pandemics
We are proud to announce that we have published a data paper in the Nature journal “Scientific Data” . Authors are A. O. Blinkova, U. Khakurel, H. G. Gaddy, S.-E. Mamelund & M. Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar.
You can read the paper here: Construction and curation of a data set of historical mental health incidence in Norway | Scientific Data
We are pleased to release the schedule for our Fall 2025 seminar series. As in previous series, the seminar will be held via Zoom at 16.00 Central European Time on Thursdays.
To access the Zoom meetings, please join our mailing list here.
18 September: Robert Braid (University of Montpellier), Survivors: The psychological impact of the Black Death on economic performance.
25 September: Max Marczinek (University of Oxford), Labour Scarcity and Productivity: Insights from the Last Nordic Plague.
2 October: Katarina Luise Matthes (University of Zürich), Fetal Stress during the 1918–1920 Influenza Pandemic: Short- and Long-Term Health Effects in Switzerland.
9 October: Hampton Gaddy (London School of Economics), Mismeasuring pandemics in causal research: Errors, biases, mismatched estimands, ambiguous channels, and the 1918 influenza pandemic.
30 October: Florian Bonnet (INED), Contextualizing the Global Burden of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Historical and Geographical Exploration of Excess Mortality in France, 1901–2021.
6 November: Christoph Gradmann (University of Oslo), An Invisible Epidemic: Studying Tuberculosis in Interwar Tanganyika.
13 November: Andrea Kifyasi (University of Dar es Salaam), From China to Africa: A History of the 1957 Asian Influenza Pandemic in Colonial Tanganyika.
20 November: Sheilagh Ogilvie (University of Oxford), Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid.
4 December: Abigail Dumes (University of Michigan), Long COVID as Disability in Higher Education.
**Postponed until Spring 2026**
11 December: Mallika Snyder (University of California, Berkeley), Who Will Remember COVID-19? Kinship Memory after a Global Pandemic.
Deprivation amplification theory suggests that the health effects of individual deprivation are amplified for people who live in areas with greater levels of deprivation. In a new paper in Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, first authored by former PANSOC post-doc, Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, we postulate that health (represented by norovirus incidence) is influenced and amplified by deprivation (a measure that includes socio-economic factors), and believe that this association has been neglected in surveillance models of infectious diseases. We construct a social epidemiological extension of a known surveillance model to evaluate the inclusion of deprivation in surveillance models using the German Index of Socio-economic Deprivation (GISD) in an endemic-epidemic model. We evaluate model types considered in the literature on the basis of Akaike’s information criterion. Our results suggest that a social epidemiological endemic-epidemic model with the GISD for enterically transmitted infections does not need to also include time-varying contact matrices as transmission weights.
You can read the paper here: Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2025
