Next PANSOC Webinar on 22 September (1600 CET)

masv on 16. September 2022

Nele Brusselaers, Antwerp University & Karolinska Institutet & Ghent University, will present “How science affected Covid-19 policy in Sweden.” (Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a link.)

The Swedish response to the Covid-19 pandemic has stood out from the start. Together with a group of scientists, medical doctors and a human rights journalist, we evaluated how science affected the Swedish Covid-19 policy during 2020. We tried to disentangle who was involved in the decision making and why certain decisions were made, putting everything in a socio-cultural and historical perspective. Our paper published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in March 2022 quickly went viral becoming one of the most-popular research outputs ever (nr 131 of 22 million articles ever on September 12, 2022, according to Altmetrics). This shows that the so-called Swedish approach is still a hot topic with very strong defenders and opponents in Sweden and abroad. In addition, I was also involved in another project comparing the health policy, epidemiology and economic consequences of the pandemic in the Nordic region (Irfan et al, Journal of Global Health 2022), the countries which are most similar to Sweden in almost all aspects… Sweden was clearly not the best of this class…

Nele Brusselaers is a Professor in Clinical Epidemiology at Antwerp University in Belgium (Global Health Institute), Associate Professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden (Centre for Translational Microbiome Researcher), and Guest Professor at Ghent University, Belgium. She completed her training as a medical doctor (2008), PhD (2010), master in infection control/hospital hygiene (2010) and first post-doc at Ghent University in Belgium (2012). Nele also obtained a master in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (by distance learning, 2015). Towards the end of 2020 she moved back to Belgium to combine her research in Sweden with a fulltime academic position in Belgium. Nele has extensive experience in clinical, cancer, microbiome and pharmaco-epidemiology by working with the Swedish nationwide health registries, several clinical (microbiome) cohorts and systematic reviews and meta-analyses, resulting in over 140 peer-reviewed articles. She has also been an active member of the Swedish Scientific Forum Covid-19, a group of independent researchers and medical doctors “that disseminates science-based knowledge about the major issues and challenges that the ongoing pandemic have posed to the world and our country”.

The PANSOC Webinar series returns September 15 at 1600 CET!

masv on 9. September 2022

Kirsty Short, The University of Queensland, will present “Obesity and viral disease: lessons for pandemic preparedness.”

Obesity first emerged as a risk factor for severe viral infection in the 2009 influenza virus pandemic. This was then strongly echoed in the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we discuss how obesity increases the severity of respiratory viral infections and how we can improve pandemic preparedness given the overwhelming number of people who are overweight or obese.

Bio: A/Prof Kirsty Short is head of the Respiratory Virus Pathogenesis Laboratory at the University of Queensland. She investigates the pathogenesis of human influenza virus, avian influenza virus and SARS-CoV-2. Her work covers a broad range of topics including viral evolution, the role of host comorbidities in viral disease and the effect of age on the innate immune response.

Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a Zoom link.

Fall 2022 Webinar Schedule

masv on 14. June 2022

Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC)

We are pleased to announce the fall webinar series. All talks will be held Thursdays at 1600 CET (Oslo time) unless otherwise noted. Please contact jessicad@oslomet.no if you need a link.

15 September: Kirsty Short, The University of Queensland, “Obesity and viral disease: lessons for pandemic preparedness.”

22 September: Nele Brusselaers, Antwerp University & Karolinska Institutet, “How science affected Covid-19 policy in Sweden.”

29 September: Sushma Dahal & Gerardo Chowell, Georgia State University, “COVID-19 mortality among Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in Mexico.”

6 October: Alexi Gugushvili, University of Oslo, “The COVID-19 Pandemic and War: The Case of Ukraine.”

20 October, 1500 CET: Masato Shizume, Waseda University, The Great Influenza Pandemic in Japan: Policy Responses and Socioeconomic Consequences.”

27 October: Ben Schneider, Oslo Metropolitan University, TBA

3 November: Heather Battles, The University of Auckland, “A historical syndemic? Measles and scarlet fever in the Victorian goldfields.”

17 November: Esyllt Jones, University of Manitoba, TBA

1 December: Tobias A. Jopp and Mark Spoerer, University of Regensburg, “Tracing the temporal and spatial course of the Spanish flu in Germany.”

Next webinar (12 May, 1600 CET)

masv on 10. May 2022

Carolyn Orbann, University of Missouri, will present “Co-circulating respiratory diseases at the end of the 1918 influenza pandemic.”

The 2020-2021 flu season was among the lowest on record, largely due to the wide circulation of COVID-19 and the measures in place for pandemic control. In this talk, I will present evidence on a variety of respiratory diseases circulating in the US state of Missouri during the 1918 flu pandemic. We will discuss how mortality rates from diseases that typically cause predictable mortality were impacted by the influenza pandemic and how we might understand those changes using a syndemic framework.

Carolyn Orbann is Associate Teaching Professor of Health Sciences at the University of Missouri – Columbia. Her current research interests include infectious disease in historic human populations and the impact of culture on disease spread. She uses historic data, including primary and secondary sources, to understand epidemics in the past, primarily 1918 flu and diseases of colonization in 18th century California. She uses computer simulation models to test ideas about the impact of human culture on infectious disease dynamics. 

Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a Zoom link.

Next Webinar 5 May

masv on 29. April 2022

On 5 May at 1600 CET, Vibeke Narverud Nyborg, University of South-Eastern Norway and PANSOC, will present Different approaches to Public Health Legislation as means in fighting the influenza pandemic 1918 to 1920.

In the decades prior to the outbreak of the influenza pandemic in 1918, Norway had a significant development and focus on public health, including national health legislation and organizing the administration of public health. These legislations were based on international development of medicine, understanding disease and infection, and preventive measures in addition to national uniqueness. Despite this, disagreement and different local solutions to the major health threat caused by the pandemic seem to characterize the use of national legislation as a driving force in fighting the influenza pandemic in Norway. In this presentation I focus on different approaches to explore and understand how national legislation was used, and within what framework local authorities based their decision in trying to fight the influenza pandemic between 1918 and 1920.

Vibeke Narverud Nyborg is Associate Professor in the History of Medicine and Health at University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). Since August 2021, she has been Associate Professor II at PANSOC, working with historical pandemics, focusing specifically on the 1918 flu and national legislation. She has a PhD from USN from 2020 where she focused on conceptual meaning making in historical education of doctors and nurses. For further information, please see her profile on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vibeke-narverud-nyborg-33b04183/

Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a Zoom link.

Next webinar April 21

masv on 13. April 2022

The next PANSOC webinar will be on April 21 at 1600. Jord Hanus, University of Antwerp, will present “Socioeconomic Status and Epidemic Mortality in an Urban Environment (Mechelen, Belgium): Were Dysentery (1794) and Cholera (1866) Socially Neutral Diseases?”

In this paper, we present some of the first results of the http://www.epibel.be project on Epidemics and Inequality in Belgium, investigating socio-economic gradients in (epidemic) mortality for the mid-sized town of Mechelen (or Malines). We study the social profiles of the victims of two large outbreaks (dysentery in 1794 and cholera in 1866) in comparison with regular mortality in an attempt to map the ‘epidemic mortality premium’. This analysis connects various strands of literature, pushing our understanding of the health gradient further back in time as well as providing a detailed long-term understanding of an early-modern urban mortality regime, both in times of (epidemiological) crisis and in demographically less eventful periods.

Jord’s bio: “Since September 2021 I work as postdoc researcher on the EPIBEL project (www.epibel.be), which allows me to combine my passion for the study of inequalities in economic and social development with a very topical theme: the societal impact of epidemics. Before, I wrote a PhD (2006-2010) and worked as postdoc (2010-2013) on economic growth and inequality in the early modern Low Countries. Until 2021 I then served as Head of the Research Affairs Office of the UAntwerp’s Dept. of Research Affairs & Innovation (ADOC).”

Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a link.