Influenza Excess Mortality from 1950–2000 in Tropical Singapore

Tropical regions have been shown to exhibit different influenza seasonal patterns compared to their temperate counterparts. However, there is little information about the burden of annual tropical influenza epidemics across time, and the relationship between tropical influenza epidemics compared with other regions. Methods Data on monthly national mortality and population was obtained from 1947 to 2003 in Singapore. To determine excess mortality for each month, we used a moving average analysis for each month from 1950 to 2000. From 1972, influenza viral surveillance data was available. Before 1972, information was obtained from serial annual government reports, peer-reviewed journal articles and press articles. Results The influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968 resulted in substantial mortality. In addition, there were 20 other time points with significant excess mortality. Of the 12 periods with significant excess mortality post-1972, only one point (1988) did not correspond to a recorded influenza activity. For the 8 periods with significant excess mortality periods before 1972 excluding the pandemic years, 2 years (1951 and 1953) had newspaper reports of increased pneumonia deaths. Excess mortality could be observed in almost all periods with recorded influenza outbreaks but did not always exceed the 95% confidence limits of the baseline mortality rate. Conclusion Influenza epidemics were the likely cause of most excess mortality periods in post-war tropical Singapore, although not every epidemic resulted in high mortality. It is therefore important to have good influenza surveillance systems in place to detect influenza activity.

The Sicker Sex

Arguments about the weaker sex notwithstanding, there is no contest about the identity of the sicker sex—it is males, almost every time. Everyone knows that old age homes have more widows than widowers, but the disparity extends far beyond the elderly. Fewer women than men died in the 1917–1918 influenza epidemic; the differential mortality was not related to World War I, as originally thought, but was global and widespread among ages. Kruger and Nesse [1] compared men's and women's mortality rates for 11 causes of death in men and women from 20 countries, including accidents and homicide as well as infectious and non-infectious diseases, and found that men virtually always die earlier. They concluded, “Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries”. Furthermore, in many free-living mammals, males are more likely than females to harbor parasites or to suffer more intensely from their effects. During the mid-20th century, a virtual cottage industry developed in which investigators experimentally infested laboratory rodents with parasites and documented any resulting sex differences in the prevalence or intensity of the infection that developed [2]. Males usually developed higher parasitemia, with castration removing the sex difference. The persistence of these patterns in the laboratory suggests that the sex difference is not merely due to differences in exposure to parasites, with males and females behaving differently in the field and hence incurring different risks of infection, but to an inherent sex difference in vulnerability. What causes this disparity between the sexes in longevity and parasite susceptibility? Most research has focused on the proximate mechanisms, such as endocrine or immunological pathways, that are immediately responsible for any one cause. Here, I take a different approach. Sex differences in infection rates or mortality may come about for the same reasons as other differences between males and females, such as morphology: selection acts differently on the sexes because they maximize their fitness in different ways. Below I discuss an evolutionary approach to the question of why males so often die sooner and develop more diseases than females [3],[4]. Some researchers are hopeful that the gap between men's and women's lifespans will close as we develop better medical care and education about health risks, but I will argue instead that the disparity is not going away any time soon.

Adventures in Clinical Chemistry and Proteomics: A Personal Account

My 90 years have witnessed a basic transformation in the understanding of disease in terms of molecules, largely through the application of new instruments and technologies. The ultimate distillation of what really works at this level—the quantitative measurements that generate clinical insight from specimens like blood—is clinical chemistry. This field has fascinated me for a long time, partly because of my interest in inventing or improving analytical instruments, and partly as an anchor to real-world biology that is frequently missing in academic research. A second thread of interest to me is how successful research gets done, and how to know when a solitary inventor is needed and when it takes an army. Here I recount some personal experiences relevant to these interests, ranging across several fields and in organizations of widely varying scale, all ultimately linked to clinical chemistry and the human proteome.Interdisciplinary R&D has always fascinated me, and my introduction to it occurred in unusual times, during World War II. I was on active duty in the US Navy before Pearl Harbor as a Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class, and was discharged at the war’s end as a Lieutenant (jg) line officer, with zero instruction in between on how to be a naval officer. Despite (or because of) this fortuitous absence of formal tuition, I found that much of the fun and adventure in life lies in the cracks between disciplines, and that these cracks can be wider in large organizations (like a Navy in wartime) than smaller ones.Flying in blimps off the Carolina coast during the height of antisubmarine warfare, it occurred to me that maybe, lacking a bombsight, we couldn’t actually sink a German submarine if we found it. After developing proper instrumentation, I found experimentally this was largely true, and a proper bombsight was developed. …

Valley of the Wolves as representative of Turkish popular attitudes towards Iraq

\udIn 2006, the Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves (Kurtlar Vadisi-Irak) (Serdar Akar, 2006), was released to audiences in Turkey and Europe. Costing $10 million, it was the most costly production in the history of Turkish cinema, breaking all box office records in the country. A fantastical account of a Turkish victory over a fictional US invasion of the country, Valley of the Wolves has been interpreted as a reaction to the ‘Sack Incident’ (‘çuval olayı’) of July 2003, in which eleven Turkish soldiers were hooded and arrested in northern Iraq shortly after the United States invasion. The film’s title hence refers to a dark and dangerous place where howling and vicious ‘wolves’—namely Americans and Kurds—are gathered.\udThis paper argues that Valley of the Wolves confirms a reemergence of 1960s Turkish industry (Yeşilçam) films which emphasized the historical conflict between Western and Islamic values. It discusses the extent to which Valley of the Wolves reflects popular Turkish attitudes toward the US war on Iraq, and it analyzes the film’s projection of Turkish humiliation, anger, and frustration following the Sack Incident. The paper also addresses how Valley of the Wolves engages US–Turkish relations and Turkish concerns over current Iraq-related politics, especially the US–Kurdish alliance, the establishment of an independent Kurdistan, Turkmen and the issue of Kirkuk, US violations of international law in Iraq, and the conflict between Islam and ChristianityValley of the Wolves as Representative of Turkish Popular Attitudes toward Ira

The July 2006 war and the Lebanese blogosphere: towards an alternative media tool in covering wars

Intellectuals and War

The Figure of the Soldier

The figure of the officer: class, gender, and military hierarchy in the Swiss army in the 1930s and 1940s

Taking the example of military education and everyday life in the Swiss army during the World War II, this article aims to address two issues that have so far only found marginal consideration in most studies of military history. First, the article attempts to explore in what way the military hierarchy was gendered, thus borrowing from Joan Scott's argument that the category of gender can be useful for studying power relationships within social institutions. Second, it will discuss the extent to which this gendered system of command and subordination was linked with the concept of class and it will examine the role of the army as a training camp for establishing relations of social power. It will be argued that the figure of the officer functions to interconnect these two aspects, since it incorporated a form of manliness which can be characterized as hegemonic masculinity.

A glance at Spanish Embryology and Teratology during the XX Century through the academic life of Francisco Orts-Llorca (1905-1993)

Francisco Ort-Llorca (1905-1993) was one of the most outstanding Spanish embryologists of the XX century. He was disciple of Henri Rouvire in Paris (France), Alfred Fischel in Vienna (Austria), Walther Vogt in Munich (Germany) and Pedro Ara in Madrid (Spain). From 1935, he was professor of Human Anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine of Cadiz, belonged then to the University of Seville (accidentally, in the University of Valencia, during the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939) and, later on, at the Faculty of Medicine of Madrid (Complutense University) from 1954 to 1975. He was internationally recognized in anatomical sciences and stood out for his contributions to descriptive and experimental Embryology and Teratology, particularly in those aspects connected to the normal and pathological development of the heart and visual organs.

From Chemical Embryology to Nucleosome Patterning - an interview with Roumen G. Tsanev

Roumen Tsanev was a prominent Bulgarian scientist whose pioneering ideas about the role for chromatin in cell differentiation and development led him to propose the first hypothesis for epigenetic information based on a histone code. To test experimentally his ideas, Dr.Tsanev explored nucleosome structure and heterogeneity and generated seminal data on nucleosome segregation in replicating chromatin. Roumen Tsanev made significant contributions to the understanding of chromatin changes that underlie zygotic gene activation. He identified sperm specific chromatin components tightly bound to DNA and demonstrated that the histone complement of the male pronucleus appears before the onset of DNA synthesis in the mouse zygote. In this interview, Roumen Tsanev talks about his passion for science and literature, reminisces about surmounting the harsh realities in post-war communist Bulgaria through creativity and determination, and explains what led him to propose that histones were carriers of epigenetic information. Dr. Tsanev discusses mathematical models of gene regulation and recalls computer simulations that reveal the non-linearity of genetic networks. He explains how this non-linearity could affect cell proliferation, differentiation, development and evolution.