Polio in Italy

The history of polio in Italy is relatively short because the particular social and demographic history of the country has actually compressed the most dramatic history of the polio epidemic into only 40 years, from the first severe epidemic just before World War II to the early 1980s, when the epidemic vanished thanks to an effective and country-wide vaccination campaign. The epidemic, however, had a formidable impact on medicine, public health, social attitudes and culture. An analysis of this case study can illustrate the impact of an epidemic of a severe disease on individual and collective life, and at the same time the efficacy of public health measures against it, and the importance of the social structure, state and private, in coping with the consequences of the epidemics. In this period, the attitude towards the handicapped changed from stigma and isolation to social integration, thanks especially to the changes in health legislation, social action and the initiatives of the patient' associations

Come si sviluppa e come si esaurisce una pandemia? Una storia naturale e sociale

EnThe scientific revolution linked to the names of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch has profoundly changed the way we understand, define and control communicable diseases, thanks to the affirmation of a causal link between the specificity of a given germ and a specific disease. As a result of the interaction between different forms of life, infectious diseases are biological processes and therefore have a natural history, with an origin, a life and a death. The spread of epidemics over time and space is the subject of numerous historical and epidemiological researches. In the last few decades the origin of diseases and their emergence have been studied extensively, but little has been understood about their disappearance. This article, in addition to suggesting the way to better understand the causal mechanisms of the emergence of a communicable disease, provides some historical examples of the disappearance of contagious diseases, questioning the causes of these phenomena.ItLa rivoluzione scientifica legata al nome di Louis Pasteur e di Robert Koch ha cambiato in profondità il modo di comprendere, definire e controllare le malattie trasmissibili, grazie all'affermazione di un legame causale fra la specificità di un dato germe e una specifica malattia. In quanto risultato dell'interazione fra forme diverse di vita, le malattie infettive sono processi di tipo biologico e hanno quindi una storia naturale, con un'origine, una vita e una morte. La diffusione delle epidemie nel tempo e nello spazio è oggetto di numerose ricerche storiche ed epidemiologiche. Da pochi decenni si è molto studiata l'origine delle malattie, la loro emergenza, ma ancora poco si è compreso sulla loro scomparsa. Questo articolo, oltre a suggerire il modo per meglio comprendere i meccanismi causali dell'emergenza di una malattia trasmissibile, fornisce alcuni esempi storici della scomparsa di malattie contagiose, interrogandosi sulle cause di tali fenomeni

Health systems sustainability for rare diseases. Preface

Abstrac

Open data, Science and Society: launching Oasis, the flagship initiative of the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia

The Open Data philosophy has gained considerable momentum in recent years, both in society and the scientific community. The accessibility via web of open data from the public sector has remarkably increased in the last decade, although there are substantial differences among nations (http://datacatalogs.org/). The expectation of many citizens, organizations and pressure groups (the so called “open government” movement) is that the free release of data from public administrations may help increase government transparency and accountability

Perspectives on Open Science and scientific data sharing::an interdisciplinary workshop

Looking at Open Science and Open Data from a broad perspective. This is the idea behind "Scientific data sharing: an interdisciplinary workshop", an initiative designed to foster dialogue between scholars from different scientific domains which was organized by the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia in Anagni, Italy, 2-4 September 2013.We here report summaries of the presentations and discussions at the meeting. They deal with four sets of issues: (i) setting a common framework, a general discussion of open data principles, values and opportunities; (ii) insights into scientific practices, a view of the way in which the open data movement is developing in a variety of scientific domains (biology, psychology, epidemiology and archaeology); (iii) a case study of human genomics, which was a trail-blazer in data sharing, and which encapsulates the tension that can occur between large-scale data sharing and one of the boundaries of openness, the protection of individual data; (iv) open science and the public, based on a round table discussion about the public communication of science and the societal implications of open science. There were three proposals for the planning of further interdisciplinary initiatives on open science. Firstly, there is a need to integrate top-down initiatives by governments, institutions and journals with bottom-up approaches from the scientific community. Secondly, more should be done to popularize the societal benefits of open science, not only in providing the evidence needed by citizens to draw their own conclusions on scientific issues that are of concern to them, but also explaining the direct benefits of data sharing in areas such as the control of infectious disease. Finally, introducing arguments from social sciences and humanities in the educational dissemination of open data may help students become more profoundly engaged with Open Science and look at science from a broader perspective

The multiple faces of self-assembled lipidic systems

Lipids, the building blocks of cells, common to every living organisms, have the propensity to self-assemble into well-defined structures over short and long-range spatial scales. The driving forces have their roots mainly in the hydrophobic effect and electrostatic interactions. Membranes in lamellar phase are ubiquitous in cellular compartments and can phase-separate upon mixing lipids in different liquid-crystalline states. Hexagonal phases and especially cubic phases can be synthesized and observed in vivo as well. Membrane often closes up into a vesicle whose shape is determined by the interplay of curvature, area difference elasticity and line tension energies, and can adopt the form of a sphere, a tube, a prolate, a starfish and many more. Complexes made of lipids and polyelectrolytes or inorganic materials exhibit a rich diversity of structural morphologies due to additional interactions which become increasingly hard to track without the aid of suitable computer models. From the plasma membrane of archaebacteria to gene delivery, self-assembled lipidic systems have left their mark in cell biology and nanobiotechnology; however, the underlying physics is yet to be fully unraveled