Mindre fornøyd med livet under korona

masv on 28. June 2021

Alt tatt i betraktning, hvor tilfreds er du med livet i dag? Dette spørsmålet svarte norske arbeidstakere på i 2019 og deretter i 2020, midt under pandemien. Nan Zou Bakkeli har sammenlignet svarene. Det er neppe overraskende at rike er lykkeligere enn fattige, friske mer tilfredse enn syke og folk i familier lykkeligere enn enslige. Men hvordan har det gått med den store gruppen nordmenn som ikke har alle disse lykkefaktorene på plass?

portrait of researcher Nan Bakkeli

Les intervju med Nan om forskningen her: Mindre fornøyd med livet under korona – OsloMet

Paperet kan du lese her: Health, work, and contributing factors on life satisfaction: A study in Norway before and during the COVID-19 pandemic – ScienceDirect

Indigenous people & Pandemics

masv on 22. June 2021

The influenza pandemics of 1918 and 2009, as well as the ongoing COVID-19, show that Indigenous people have extremely high risk of severe disease outcomes, but the reasons for this vulnerability are unclear. This week, the head of PANSOC, Svenn-Erik Mamelund, will hold a talk on Indigenous people & Pandemics for the “Indigenous Peoples and Development Branch, Division for Inclusive Social Development, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, at the United Nations in New York”

The influenza pandemic hit the native communities in Alaska hard. These children in an orphanage in Nushagak, Alaska, lost their parents. Summer of 1919. Source: Alaska Historical Library

The influenza pandemic hit the native communities in Alaska hard. These children in an orphanage in Nushagak, Alaska, lost their parents. Summer of 1919. Source: Alaska Historical Library

In August 2022 to June 2023, Mamelund will also lead a CAS-project on this topic. You can read more here:

Social science meets biology: indigenous people and severe influenza outcomes – CAS

Why do Indigenous people have high risk of severe influenza? – CAS,

Announcing the CAS projects 2022/23: from influenza to peace-and-conflict, and algebra – CAS

New paper out: economic crisis and obesity

masv on 17. June 2021

This new study by our new post-doc Margarida Pereira suggests that the economic crisis in 2008 enhanced the social inequalities regarding childhood obesity in Portugal. These results aid the development of evidence-based strategies to lessen the social inequities in health outcomes created by the crisis.

The paper is published in the journal Public Health and can be found here: The economic crisis impact on the body mass index of children living in distinct urban environments – ScienceDirect

New paper out: “Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic among migrants: An innovative, system-level, interdisciplinary approach is needed to improve public health”

masv on 3. June 2021

Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic among migrants: An innovative, system-level, interdisciplinary approach is needed to improve public health - Esperanza Diaz, Svenn-Eirik Mamelund, Jarle Eid, Henriette Sinding Aasen, Oddvar Martin Kaarbøe,...

Why is a new approach needed to reduce ethnic inequalities in pandemic disease burden & improve public health? In this paper, the PANSOC Centre leader discuss this question in collaboration with Esperanza Díaz Pérez and her colleagues at the Pandemic Research Center in Bergen and also colleagues at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

The paper is published in Scandinavian Journal of Public Health and can be found here:

Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic among migrants: An innovative, system-level, interdisciplinary approach is needed to improve public health – Esperanza Diaz, Svenn-Eirik Mamelund, Jarle Eid, Henriette Sinding Aasen, Oddvar Martin Kaarbøe, Rebecca Jane Cox Brokstad, Siri Gloppen, Anders Beyer, Bernadette Nirmal Kumar, 2021 (sagepub.com)

Webinar video available

masv on 26. May 2021

Last week, MSCA fellow Jessica Dimka presented her project on disability as a risk factor during the 1918 pandemic. Watch the video here:

https://hioa365-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/jara_oslomet_no/ESZHmya9nFpMkfelP-PGWpgBBDsKDgPGhuAuBbFmgVbhZQ?e=xiwyq6

Jessica noted several sources that helped determine disease values used in her simulation model (and similar models for Newfoundland communities – see work by her PhD supervisor, Lisa Sattenspiel, and their colleagues). These sources include:

“‘An Avalanche of Unexpected Sickness’: Institutions and Disease in 1918 and Today.” Chelsea Chamberlain. June 23, 2020. Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. https://www.shgape.org/an-avalanche-of-unexpected-sickness/

Ferguson, N. M., Fraser, C., Donnelly, C. A., Ghani, A. C., & Anderson, R. M. (2004). Public health risk from the avian H5N1 influenza epidemic. Science, 304(5673), 968–969. https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.1096898

Mills, C. E., Robins, J. M., & Lipsitch, M. (2004). Transmissibility of 1918 pandemic influenza. Nature, 432, 904–906. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03063

“How does epidemics end?”

masv on 20. May 2021

The 10th and last webinar this spring is held by associate professor at University of Oxford, Erica Charters on June 10 at 1600-1700 (CET).

Please send e-mail to masv@oslomet.no to get the zoom-link

See Charters personal page here: Dr Erica Charters | Faculty of History (ox.ac.uk)

echarters

Blurb: As COVID-19 drags on and vaccines seem to promise widespread immunity, the world’s attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. Yet how do societies know when an epidemic has ended and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate an epidemic’s end? Who has the insight, authority, and credibility to decipher these signs? Although researchers have paid a great deal of attention to the origins of epidemics and to the climactic high points of outbreaks, they have paid little attention to how epidemics actually end. This talk will redirect attention to the ending of epidemics, making use of historical and other disciplinary research to provide a tentative framework for outlining how epidemics end, as part of the interdisciplinary project ‘How Epidemics End’, based at the University of Oxford.