Mark Honigsbaum

It is deeply troubling that the USA's new health secretary believes in conspiracy theories and is hostile towards modern medicine.

Few events are as compelling as an epidemic. When sufficiently severe, an epidemic evokes responses from every sector of society, laying bare social and economic fault lines and presenting politicians with fraught medical and moral choices.

Understanding the battle over immunization — from the pre-Victorian era onward — between public health and the people may help in treating anti-vax sentiment.

How can we commemorate grief on the scale of Covid-19? A year into the pandemic, the coronavirus has left a void in all our communities — a vacuum that cries out to be filled.

In the 1720s, Cotton Mather supported an early form of inoculation; Washington, Jefferson and Adams followed suit.

The Spanish influenza virus — or at least its viral offspring — have been circulating for 100 years, but it is only in recent years that histories of the pandemic have achieved a similar ubiquity in our culture.

Ebola seems to draw on a familiar store of images and metaphors — of parasites and hot zones, desperate patients, and intrepid disease detectives. But which earlier epidemics does it echo, and what can the parallels tell us?

Around the world, vaccines are in retreat, shunned by populations who have never been exposed to the diseases that blighted their grandparents’ generation — yet vaccines have saved more lives than almost any other intervention in medical history.

While wars are endlessly memorialised in the West, the non-narrative and morally complex nature of a pandemic mean it is rare to come across a memorial to its victims, much less a monument recalling the heroism of health workers.

An exploration of how epidemic disease is imagined in popular culture — from Rise of the Planet of the Apes to our deepest fears about pandemic spread across a connected world.