- Why did the 1918 flu pandemic become known as the 'Spanish' influenza despite likely originating elsewhere?
- Why did the 1918 influenza kill healthy young adults at unusually high rates instead of mainly the elderly?
- How many people did the 1918 flu pandemic infect and kill compared to the First World War?
- How did scientists eventually recover material to study the origins of the 1918 flu virus nearly a century later?
Pandemics and Epidemic Response
Outbreaks of disease and the public health response to them.
- Why did two separate haemorrhagic fever outbreaks occur almost simultaneously in Zaire and Sudan in 1976?
- Why did scientists choose to name the newly isolated virus after the Ebola River rather than a nearby village?
- What made the Zaire strain of Ebola so much more lethal than the Sudan strain in the first outbreak?
- How did quarantine alone manage to end the first Ebola outbreak without any available treatment?
- What symptoms led the CDC to flag the five Los Angeles cases described in the June 1981 MMWR report as unusual?
- How many AIDS cases and deaths had been recorded in the United States by the end of 1981?
- How quickly did laboratories in different countries identify the SARS coronavirus once the outbreak began?
- How many countries and deaths were ultimately linked to the 2003 SARS outbreak?
- What measures brought the SARS outbreak to a halt by July 2003?
- What did the SARS outbreak reveal about how quickly a respiratory pathogen can spread globally?
- What evidence did Harald zur Hausen find that linked human papillomavirus, rather than herpes, to cervical cancer?
- Which HPV strains did zur Hausen identify as most responsible for cervical cancer, and how did that lead to a vaccine?
- What four genetic lineages combined to produce the 2009 H1N1 reassortant virus?
- Why were people born before 1957 partially protected from the 2009 H1N1 virus?
- How did the actual severity of the 2009 pandemic compare to the early case-fatality estimates?
- Why did the 2014 Ebola outbreak spread so much farther than earlier outbreaks had?
- How did local funeral practices contribute to the transmission of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone?
- What gaps in the global health response system did the 2014 Ebola epidemic expose?
- What is ring vaccination, and how was it used to test the Ebola vaccine during the 2018–2020 DRC outbreak?
- Why did it take more than four decades after Ebola's 1976 discovery to license a vaccine against it?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee award nine heads of government a prize in medical education during the pandemic?
- How did political decisions shape case counts more directly than laboratory results during the first year of COVID-19?
- How long did it take from the virus being sequenced to the first vaccines receiving emergency authorisation?
- Why did the Nobel Committee's 2020 timing require no further explanation?