Indigenous peoples and pandemics

Risk perception, adaptation, and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic in Southeast Alaska Natives

“…Despite a century of hindsight establishing the foundation of knowledge that Indigenous groups tend to suffer unequal pandemic outcomes, responses of Indigenous communities worldwide from their own perspectives have yet to be extensively elevated. There is a general lack of quantitative epidemiological data on the experiences of specifically Indigenous populations apart from aggregate national populations during pandemics, and this dearth can lead to volatile and misleading conclusions about variation within and between populations ( Alves et al, 2022 ). Others have pointed out that high-level population research conflates Indigenous data with those of the larger population ( Chatwood et al, 2012 ), which leads to homogenization of racial, ethnic, nationality, and linguistic categories ( Dimka et al, 2022 ).…”

Age-specific mortality and the role of living remotely: The 1918-20 influenza pandemic in Kautokeino and Karasjok, Norway

“…Our work provides another example of the more severe impact of pandemic diseases on Indigenous populations of the world, and it also points out that the reasons for the serious impact include both factors broadly common to Indigenous people, such as remoteness of the population and access to resources, and factors that are specific to the affected regions. Our results also highlight the important conclusion that the pandemic experience of Indigenous peoples, such as age-specific patterns of mortality, may vary in fundamental ways from that observed in the urban populations more commonly studied, stressing the need to collect more and better disease data and to carefully assess potential differences in COVID-19 pandemic outcomes by Indigenous status [ 6 , 10 ] if we are to better understand and predict future pandemic impacts. Both historical studies such as this one and more recent studies on, for example, the 2009 H1N1 influenza and the COVID-19 pandemics, clearly illustrate the importance of analysing high-quality individual-level data disaggregated by region, ethnicity, and age to illuminate issues of diffusion and levels and patterns of excess mortality over time and age.…”

One Hundred Years of Influenza A Evolution

“…In the late 1990s and early 2000s, genetic material originating from the influenza strain which caused the severe 1918 'Spanish flu' pandemic was isolated at Brevig Mission, Alaska (previously known as Teller Mission).The individual gene sequences were subsequently published and analyzed [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. While the 1918 H1N1 pandemic hit the Brevig Mission settlement hard, killing the majority of the inhabitants [9], such extreme fatality rates were not uncommon in Alaskan communities struck by the 1918 influenza [10][11][12]. The high level of preservation by the Alaskan permafrost was what allowed modern sequencing of 1918 influenza genes, including the NS gene which is our main object of study.…”