"The website is the result of a project funded by the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency to identify and research a very important group of American communities. These are called escape communities and they experienced extremely low morbidity and mortality rates during the 1918-1920 influenza epidemic," says Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., George E. Wantz professor in history of medicine and the center's director.

Researchers at the center identified seven of these types of communities, gathering several thousand pages of primary and secondary source materials from a range of public and private archives, special collections, libraries, and other institutions. Using these materials, they composed a report detailing how the escape communities met the challenges of epidemic influenza.

"We believe these documents represent the definitive collection of primary source materials on the 1918-1920 influenza epidemic escape communities. In the interest of scholarly interaction and the sharing of knowledge, we have now made digitized copies of these sources freely available to the public through the new website," says Markel.

All the original documents are on the site and are freely available to the public for research or educational purposes.

The website is organized around each of the seven escape communities and provides abridged versions of the community case studies included in the longer report. Researchers can view or download digital copies of any and all of the almost 2,000 pages of primary source documents that were collected and reviewed as part of the study.

Related Links
University of Michigan Medical School
The science and news of Epidemics on Earth
Hospital and Medical News at InternDaily.com