Pandemics & Society Seminar, 2nd October: “Fetal Stress during the 1918–1920 Influenza Pandemic: Short- and Long-Term Health Effects in Switzerland”
For the third Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Katarina Luise Matthes (University of Zürich). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 2nd October at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Blurb: This talk explores the short and long-term health and mortality effects of the 1918-19 pandemic cohorts. I will first discuss neonatal health during the 1918-19 influenza pandemic in a Swiss city and second the mortality risk across the lifespan. Previous studies have shown that individuals born during the 1918/19 pandemic exhibit reduced life expectancy compared to adjacent birth cohorts. However, the specific causes of death contributing to the elevated mortality risk over the life for those cohorts remain unexplored. This study addresses that gap by decomposing all-cause excess mortality into cause-specific contributions across the lifespan of the 1918-19 pandemic cohorts in Switzerland.
Biography: Katarina Matthes is a senior researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich. Her research focuses on past pandemics, particularly influenza, and addresses various dimensions of a pandemic, including immediate effects such as mortality, morbidity, and birth outcomes, as well as long-term health effects due to exposure in utero or early childhood. In addition, she investigates social inequalities in mortality trends in Switzerland, where she is currently PI of the SNSF project “Socio-demographic inequalities in the causes of death in Switzerland, 1877–2024.”