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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Methods: Using archival death certificates from 1954 to 1961, this study quantified the age-specific seasonal patterns, excess-mortality rates, and transmissibility patterns of the 1957 pandemic in Maricopa County, Arizona. By applying cyclical Serfling linear regression models to weekly mortality rates, the excess-mortality rates due to respiratory and all-causes were estimated for each age group during the pandemic period. The reproduction number was quantified from weekly data using a simple growth rate method and generation intervals of 3 and 4 days. Local newspaper articles from The Arizona Republic were analyzed from 1957-1958.
Results: Excess-mortality rates varied between waves, age groups, and causes of death, but overall remained low. From October 1959-June 1960, the most severe wave of the pandemic, the absolute excess-mortality rate based on respiratory deaths per 10,000 population was 17.85 in the elderly (≥65 years). All other age groups had extremely low excess-mortality and the typical U-shaped age-pattern was absent. However, relative risk was greatest (3.61) among children and young adolescents (5-14 years) from October 1957-March 1958, based on incidence rates of respiratory deaths. Transmissibility was greatest during the same 1957-1958 period, when the mean reproduction number was 1.08-1.11, assuming 3 or 4 day generation intervals and exponential or fixed distributions.
Conclusions: Maricopa County largely avoided pandemic influenza from 1957-1961. Understanding this historical pandemic and the absence of high excess-mortality rates and transmissibility in Maricopa County may help public health officials prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks of influenza.
My nearly 10 month thesis project of trying to complete a study yielded considerable ‘learning opportunities’ in large part due to my inexperience. I made numerous errors in sequencing tasks, grossly under-scoping elapsed time and hours for other tasks, completely overlooking other critical tasks, and being insensitive to how irrelevant I and my project were to the many professionals whose help I needed to complete the study. Based upon the knowledge I gained through this process, I will describe the design of a future study of retrospective patient data that will assess whether PSC patients in Phoenix, Arizona follow racial/ethnic trends. I chose Phoenix as an ideal location to perform this proposed study because of the diverse racial/ethnic population in the greater Phoenix area. The goal will be to obtain and review 20 years of retrospective patient data from three large hospital groups in Phoenix, identify the races/ethnicities of PSC patients, and quantify the prevalence and incidence of PSC in such races/ethnicities. The lack of IRB uniformity among the subject hospitals/clinics will pose a challenge, but a detailed outline of how to approach the IRB approval process and obtain PSC patient data from each institution is provided.
The purpose of this research is to exploit the neglect of specific populations and diseases in Latin America through an epidemiological literature review. As a small part of a larger publication, the foci of this research was the infectious disease, helminthiasis. Using manually indexed abstracts from the National Library of Medicine database in PubMed, 4,594 papers were synthesized and then processed for further review. Of those papers, 29 provided information about helminths in indigenous populations. These papers were reviewed and used in prevalence data extraction and variable analysis. The main conclusion was to reveal the fact that from an entire health database less than 30 papers provided information about the persistence of helminths in indigenous communities of Latin America. Not only that but the few papers that could be analyzed had consistently high prevalence ratios.