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Ketola, Briga, Honkola and Lummaa published in Proc R Soc B about infectious disease risks in pre-healthcare Finland

Town population size and structuring into villages and households drive infectious disease risks in pre-healthcare Finland

Tarmo Ketola, Michael Briga, Terhi Honkola and Virpi Lummaa 2021: Proc R Soc B
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.0356

ABSTRACT

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 into a larger number of villages decreased the risk of dying from smallpox and to some extent of pertussis but it slightly increased the risk for measles. Dividing towns into a larger number of households increased the length of the epidemic for all three diseases and led to the expected slower spread of the infection. However, this could be seen only when local population sizes were small. Our results indicate that the effect
of population structure on epidemics, disease or parasite risk varies between pathogens and population sizes, hence lowering the ability to generalize the consequences of epidemics in spatially structured populations, and mapping the costs of social life, via parasites and diseases.

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Other News

Virpi in WEF Annual Meeting 2019 in Davos

Virpi Lummaa is participating in the World Economic Forum Annual meeting in Davos, speaking about her research e.g. in the session ERC IdeaLab: Healthy Ageing.

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Welcome to the multidisciplinary seminar HUMAN EVOLUTION AND CULTURAL CHANGE 1-2.11.2018

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Lummaa Group held a truly good Annual Meeting 2018 in Seili


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Visit from Silke van Daalen and Hal Caswell

We are delighted to once again host PhD candidate Silke van Daalen, who will stay with us for most of September.

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New paper accepted for publication: Human Reproductive Update

Laisk T, Tšuiko O, Jatsenko T, Hõrak P, Otala M, Lahdenperä M, Lummaa V, Tuuri T, Salumets A, Tapanainen JS:

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New Paper: Grandmotherhood across the demographic transition

Simon's latest work on the demography of grandmothers is now out in PLoS ONE. 

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Interdisciplinary seminar day with Martin Daly and Gretchen Perry

We were delighted to host Professors Martin Daly and Gretchen Perry for a day of excellent talks, with a particular focus on grandmothering and alloparental behaviour.

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Robert at HBES

Robert Lynch is at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) conference 2018 in Amsterdam

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New paper accepted for publication in Nature Reviews Genetics

The manuscript "The transition to modernity and chronic disease: mismatch and natural selection" by Stephen Corbett, Alexandre Courtiol, Virpi Lummaa, Jacob Moorad and Stephen Stea

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New Papers: Demography of grandparenthood and testing the X-linked grandmother hypothesis

Two papers out now from Simon's PhD project!

1) Changes in the Length of Grandparenthood in Finland 1790-1959, published in the Finnish Yearbook of Population Reasarch. In this paper, the team investigated how the shared time between grandparents and grandchildren changed across the demographic transition and with industrialisation. This shared time was low and stable before these major events, and began to increase rapidly after they began.

2) Limited support for the X-linked grandmother hypothesis in pre-industrial Finland, published in Biology Letters. Here, we tested whether slight differences in relatedness via the X-chromosome might lead to differences the survival of male and female grandchildren with maternal or paternal grandmothers. Though two of three predictions were supported, we concluded that the X-linked grandmother hypothesis cannot account for lineage differences by itself. 

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Prof. Virpi Lummaa

Academy Professor
virpi.lummaa (at) utu.fi

Dr. Anne Hemmi

Research Coordinator
hemmi (at) utu.fi

University of Turku
Department of Biology
Natura
Vesilinnantie 5
20014 University of Turku
Finland

Academy of Finland
University of Turku