Word: markel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Staff writer Arianna Markel can be reached at amarkel@fas.harvard.edu...
...plan for the future, researchers in Michigan went straight to the past. Led by Dr. Howard Markel, director of the University of Michigan Medical School's Center for the History of Medicine, a team of public-health experts evaluated the U.S. response to the world's last great pandemic - the Spanish flu in 1918. The new report, published in the Aug. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed the public-health measures taken by 43 U.S. cities, all with populations greater than 100,000, during the six months between Sept. 1918 and Feb. 1919. Markel found...
...Markel and colleagues divided the cities' interventions into three major categories: school closure, cancellation of public gatherings, and isolation and quarantine. During the 24 weeks researchers studied, there were 115,340 excess deaths due to pneumonia and influenza in 43 states, with a collective population of about 23 million. New York City responded to its earliest sign of infection with isolation and quarantine over a sustained period of time, beginning 13 days after the first case was detected, and had the lowest pandemic-related death rate of any city on the East coast. By contrast, Pittsburgh reacted late, waiting...
...Though Markel's study has just been published, it has already been rolled into policy. The Department of Health and Human Services and CDC finished their analysis of the study's data last December before incorporating it into the Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation, a collection of guidelines for use by individuals and communities issued by the agencies in February. The guide offers help in coordinating and implementing a strategy to protect communities from the front end of an epidemic and to keep them afloat until the appropriate pandemic-strain vaccine can be delivered to them - which officials estimate...
...that of 1918. Individual rights are guarded a lot more fiercely today than in the past, and people may not submit easily to compulsory quarantine or isolation. It is critical that if we were to implement such public health measures that we have adequate medical and psychological support, says Markel. "If you come down with the force of the law very hard, you have to ask if the public health edict helps public health or endangers it," he says. "The onus is on us as physicians, public health experts, government public health officers at the city, state and federal levels...