The 1918 influenza pandemic was a major epidemiological event of the twentieth century resulting in at least twenty million deaths worldwide; however, despite its historical, epidemiological, and biological relevance, it remains poorly understood. Here we examine the relationship between annual pneumonia and influenza death rates in the pre-pandemic (1910-17) and pandemic (1918-20) periods and ...

BACKGROUND The 1918-1919 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic killed approximately 50 million people worldwide. Historical records suggest that an early pandemic wave struck Europe during the summer of 1918. METHODS We obtained surveillance data that were compiled weekly, during 1910-1919, in Copenhagen, Denmark; the records included medically treated influenza-like illnesses (ILIs), hospitalizations, a...

The source, timing, and geographical origin of the 1918-1920 pandemic influenza A virus have remained tenaciously obscure for nearly a century, as have the reasons for its unusual severity among young adults. Here, we reconstruct the origins of the pandemic virus and the classic swine influenza and (postpandemic) seasonal H1N1 lineages using a host-specific molecular clock approach that is demo...

Recent studies have shown that most of deaths in the 1918 influenza pandemic were caused by secondary bacterial infections, primarily pneumococcal pneumonia. Given the availability of antibiotics and pneumococcal vaccination, how will contemporary populations fare when they are next confronted with pandemic influenza due to a virus with the transmissibility and virulence of that of 1918? To add...

BACKGROUND The impact of socio-demographic factors and baseline health on the mortality burden of seasonal and pandemic influenza remains debated. Here we analyzed the spatial-temporal mortality patterns of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Spain, one of the countries of Europe that experienced the highest mortality burden. METHODS We analyzed monthly death rates from respiratory diseases and al...

To determine the difference in age-specific immunoprotection during waves of influenza epidemics, we analyzed excess monthly death data for the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic in Taiwan. For persons 10-19 years of age, percentage of excess deaths was lowest in 1918 and significantly higher in 1920, perhaps indicating lack of immunoprotection from the first wave.

We have examined the superfluidity of 3He in 98.2% porous silica aerogel with up to 34% 4He at 21.6 bars. The mixture is phase separated for 4He fractions between ,11% and 34%, and the 4Herich phase preferentially occupies the regions of highest silica density in the aerogel, thus modifying the distribution of the correlated disorder seen by superfluid 3He. The 3He Tc increases slightly with 4H...

Forty years ago, a Japanese press release issued on the occasion of a visit by Arthur Kornberg called him the “father of life in a test tube.” This was in reference to his laboratory’s 1967 feat of copying single-stranded circular DNA into a replicative form and then back to an infectious viral DNA strand using purified DNA polymerase and DNA ligase (Figure 1, left panel). Although a somewhat e...

Midbrain dopaminergic (mDA) neuron development has been an intense area of research during recent years. This is due in part to a growing interest in regenerative medicine and the hope that treatment for diseases affecting mDA neurons, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), might be facilitated by a better understanding of how these neurons are specified, differentiated and maintained in vivo. This ...