Topic
Epidemics research, explained
7 open-access epidemics studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- How US presidents shaped 35 years of AIDS policy
Padamsee shows federal HIV policy zig-zagged with Republican and Democratic presidencies more than with science or caseloads alone.
- Why WHO treated 2014 Ebola as a neglected disease
Honigsbaum argues WHO’s slow 2014 PHEIC reflected Ebola’s demotion from hot biothreat to neglected African fever inside pandemic triage, not only a Geneva leadership vacuum.
- How doctors redefined influenza after 1889
Bresalier argues that post-1889 influenza was a new disease identity, aligned across field, clinic, and lab around a germ that later proved the wrong microbe.
- Do epidemic films teach us about distrust?
Against a top-down Foucault-style story that elites always use epidemics as tools of control, the paper reads cinema as evidence that afflicted communities often distrust official action — and that films themselves shape trust.
- How a marble box taught epidemic theory
Engelmann shows that the 1920s Reed-Frost epidemic theory, taught with a trough and colored marbles, made epidemics into an academic research object without replacing fieldwork.
- Smallpox, steamships, and two port cities
Brabin compares Boston and Liverpool's 1901–5 smallpox epidemics, arguing steamship traffic linked peak US incidence to Liverpool while Hope and Durgin used surveillance, isolation and ring vaccination later reused in global eradication.
- How did Russia report prison epidemics?
The authors show that Imperial officials published prison epidemic figures, while after 1917 such news became classified and public debate froze—an oscillating politics of silence.