0000000001325630
AUTHOR
Virpi Lummaa
Town population size and structuring into villages and households drive infectious disease risks in pre-healthcare Finland
Social life is often considered to cost in terms of increased parasite or pathogen risk. However, evidence for this in the wild remains equivocal, possibly because populations and social groups are often structured, which affects the local transmission and extinction of diseases. We test how the structuring of towns into villages and households influenced the risk of dying from three easily diagnosable infectious diseases—smallpox, pertussis and measles—using a novel dataset covering almost all of Finland in the pre-healthcare era (1800–1850). Consistent with previous results, the risk of dying from all three diseases increased with the local population size. However, the division of towns …
The seasonality of three childhood infections in a pre-industrial society without schools
AbstractBackgroundThe burden of many infectious diseases varies seasonally and a better understanding of the drivers of infectious disease seasonality would help to improve public health interventions. For directly transmitted highly-immunizing childhood infections, the leading hypothesis is that seasonality is strongly driven by social gatherings imposed by schools, with maxima and minima during school terms and holidays respectively. However, we currently have a poor understanding of the seasonality of childhood infections in societies without schools and whether these are driven by human social gatherings. Here, we used unique nationwide data consisting of >40 epidemics over 100 years…
Newly Digitized Database Reveals the Lives and Families of Forced Migrants from Finnish Karelia
Studies on displaced persons often suffer from a lack of data on the long-term effects of forced migration. A register created during 1960s and published as a book series ‘Siirtokarjalaisten tie’ in 1970 documented the lives of individuals who fled the southern Karelian district of Finland after its first and second occupation by the Soviet Union in 1940 and 1944. To realize the potential value of these data for scientific research, we have recently scanned the register using optical character recognition (OCR) software, and developed proprietary computer code to extract these data. Here we outline the steps involved in the digitization process, and present an overview of the Migration Kare…
Myanmar’s semi-captive working elephant population is not sustainable without capture from the wild
Wildlife populations in captivity are increasingly common, but captive populations often have a higher extinction risk and may require supplementation through wild-capture. Despite this, wild-capture may actually hinder long-term conservation goals by reducing remaining wild populations, and its direct and long-term indirect consequences for captive population viability are rarely addressed using longitudinal data. Here, we explore the implications of changes in wild-capture on population viability over 54 years using a multi-generational studbook of working Asian elephants from Myanmar. We show that population viability declined between 1960 and 2014 with declines in wild-capture. Wild-cau…
Managing elephants in the modern world: the impact of changes in traditional handling on semi-captive Asian elephant welfare
The current extinction crisis is leaving us increasingly reliant on captive populations to maintain vulnerable species. Approximately one third of the remaining global Asian elephant population (~15,000) are managed by humans and live in captivity to some extent (1). The vast majority reside in semi-captive conditions in range countries, and their relationship with humans stretches back millennia. Despite this long history, they have never been fully domesticated as they have always reproduced independently of humans (2). Instead, we rely on expert knowledge accumulated over generations of specialised elephant handlers, known as mahouts, to handle these essentially wild animals. This ancien…