Tim Riswick

Chair of new IUSSP Panel ‘Epidemics and Contagious Diseases: The Legacy of the Past’

Our proposal for a new IUSSP panel on ‘Epidemics and Contagious Diseases: The Legacy of the Past’ was approved, of which I will be the chair during the period 2022-2025.

Short summary

Were past epidemics much less discriminatory than other diseases? Did this change over time? And why? The panel’s main aim is to learn from epidemic history (its legacy of the past), most notably with regard to inequalities in health. This will be done by studying what the diverse social, economic, and environmental drivers are for the nineteenth to the twenty-first century divergences in health by focusing on epidemics and contagious diseases specifically. To accomplish this aim several workshops are proposed on specific historical epidemics and contagious diseases (such as tuberculosis, influenza, smallpox, plague, malaria) and methodological issues inviting scholars from a great variety of disciplines

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