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Published On July 11, 2018
CLINICAL RESEARCH
Podcast: The 100 Year Shadow
Martin Hirsch explores the role of a tenacious virus and the role of “fake news” in the great epidemic of 1918.
This year marks the centenary of the Spanish Flu, which killed between 50 million and 100 million people around the world. That outbreak was the most lethal event of the 20th century, and for 100 years it has spurred researchers to get ahead of the next one.
“It’s always on the mind of today’s physicians,” says Martin Hirsch, a senior physician in the infectious diseases service at Massachusetts General Hospital, and editor in chief of the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Hirsch joins the podcast to discuss what happened in 1918, what tools are on the horizon, and why the modern world may, perversely, be more at risk of a major epidemic.
The podcast also explores a curious footnote to the 1918 outbreak: how it appeared in the newspapers. A wartime culture of censorship kept the worst of the news from appearing in print, especially how influenza spread in the close and unsanitary barracks. Most papers preferred to focus on how the troops were “healthy and thankful for all of the patriotic support,” says Tim Stephens, a health historian who runs the blog The Great Influenza One Day at a Time.
Listen here, or subscribe to the Proto podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.
The 100 Year Shadow
Dispatches

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Eyes in the Sky Satellite data can be used to assess the health impact of dust storms and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Additional applications could be on the horizon.

Could This One Change Help Curb the Opioid Crisis? To prescribe an effective bridge to addiction treatment, emergency physicians must get special training and receive a waiver. Making that process easier—or eliminating the requirement altogether—could make a big impact.

One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

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