ArticlePLoS biology2020
Patterns of smallpox mortality in London, England, over three centuries.
Article in PLoS biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Transoceanic pathogen transfer in the age of sail and steam.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Viral target and metabolism-based rationale for combined use of recently authorized small molecule COVID-19 medicines: Molnupiravir, nirmatrelvir, and remdesivir.Fundamental & clinical pharmacology · 2023Review
- Grandmother presence improved grandchild survival against childhood infections but not vaccination coverage in historical Finns.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- An Adagio for Viruses, Played Out on Ancient DNA.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Review
- Ophthalmic Features and Implications of Poxviruses: Lessons from Clinical and Basic Research.Microorganisms · 2022Review
- Article
- The median age of a city's residents and population density influence COVID 19 mortality growth rates: policy implications.Israel journal of health policy research · 2022Article
- The Long-Term Success of Mandatory Vaccination Laws After Implementing the First Vaccination Campaign in 19th Century Rural Finland.American journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Face masking and COVID-19: potential effects of variolation on transmission dynamics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- An ongoing science-society-ethics experiment: The human challenge trial debate in COVID-19 pandemic: The human challenge trial debate in COVID-19 pandemic.EMBO reports · 2022Article
- The nucleoside antiviral prodrug remdesivir in treating COVID-19 and beyond with interspecies significance.Animal diseases · 2021Review
- Fast estimation of time-varying infectious disease transmission rates.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Is Omicron the end of pandemic or start of a new innings?Travel medicine and infectious diseaseReview
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Smallpox is unique among infectious diseases in the degree to which it devastated human populations, its long history of control interventions, and the fact that it has been successfully eradicated. Mortality from smallpox in London, England was carefully documented, weekly, for nearly 300 years, providing a rare and valuable source for the study of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. We describe and analyze smallpox mortality in London from 1664 to 1930. We digitized the weekly records published in the London Bills of Mortality (LBoM) and the Registrar General's Weekly Returns (RGWRs). We annotated the resulting time series with a sequence of historical events that might have influenced smallpox dynamics in London. We present a spectral analysis that reveals how periodicities in reported smallpox mortality changed over decades and centuries; many of these changes in epidemic patterns are correlated with changes in control interventions and public health policies. We also examine how the seasonality of reported smallpox mortality changed from the 17th to 20th centuries in London.
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