Maarten van Wijhe

Project title

Post-pandemic infectious disease landscapes:interactions across time and space

What is your project about?

Epidemics and pandemics can disrupt the normal epidemiological patterns of other infectious diseases. The project sets out to study these interactions—think of changes in seasonality, age-patterns, geographical distribution, and severity. Very little is known about how infectious diseases affect another, and how this plays out on as population level. To study this, you need a lot of data over a long time-period, a high disease burden, and several pandemics. This project therefore sets out to study such interactions in a historical setting, going back to the late 19th and early 20th century. There were two pandemics in that period, one in 1889-92 and another in 1918-20. Denmark has excellent data from this time, some of it still stored in paper archives. We will get this data out of the archives, and study what happed with infectious diseases before, during, in between, and after these pandemics.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

When I saw the movie “Outbreak” (1995) when I was in my early teens, I knew I wanted to be an epidemiologist and solve the mysteries of infectious diseases. I got interested in infectious disease statistics during my university studies and was further solidified during my PhD, where I studied how effective vaccination programmes have been to prevent disease and death. I used a lot of historical material, and it struck me that there was so much valuable information hidden away in these old records. I got fascinated by historical epidemiology as a field and what these old data could tell us about what happened in the past, as well as inform the present and future. Denmark is ideal for this as it is basically an epidemiologist dream: the Danes have been in the top of the class in record keeping for centuries. I started researching the Spanish Flu and realized that we often forget to look at all the other infectious diseases during that time. I set out to change this.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

Our society is the sum of our collective past experiences, and to understand who we are today, we need to understand our past. But studying historical infectious diseases always meets the issue of translation: can we trust these old sources and how does the historical setting translate to modern day? These questions are always a challenge but they can be overcome by accepting the limitations inherit in the sources - we may not be able to identify with certainty the infection of a specific person - and focus on patterns instead. By studying populations and the bigger pictures, we can still draw conclusions that are relevant for our modern understanding. This is for example how, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers knew there would be multiple waves. Another challenge we often face is getting from the archival sources to datasets that can be used for research. Luckily, recent years has seen rapid developments in the automatic transcription of old texts that will significantly speed things up.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

There will come a new pandemic, and we need to be prepared not just for the pandemic disease, but also for the consequences on other infectious diseases. The insights we will generate in this project will help pandemic preparedness planning by predicting how other diseases will behave after a pandemic. With this   we can prepare for the post-pandemic periods with, for example more beds for children wards if we expect increase in childhood infections, or an earlier influenza vaccination campaign then normal if its seasonality is expected to be different. Besides these answers, the project will also make available three high quality databases, giving a unique view into the Danish historical experience with infectious diseases. This includes the digitization of historical hospital records. In the future, I envision that we can link these records to other historical databases, opening new avenues of historical health studies.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

It is a great honor to receive a Sapere Aude: DFF-Starting Grant. Historical epidemiology is an old, but generally underestimated field. This grant is therefore a fantastic support for my vision and ideas, and the research field in general. It will give me the opportunity to establish a highly interdisciplinary research group at Roskilde University, and thereby lay the foundation to work towards my ambitions. The Sapere Aude programme has a strong focus to support research on a national and international high level. Internationally, the field is moving rapidly, and I envision that this project will open many new connections and collaborations both nationally and internationally and inspire new young researchers into this exciting field. I am excited for the next couple of years and look very much forward to further my competencies as a research leader and help move historic epidemiological research into a bright future.

Background and personal life

I grew up in a small village south of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and studied biomedical sciences at the Radboud University. I did my PhD in the Netherlands as well, and through that started on my road down historical epidemiology. I have been in Denmark since 2018 where I have done both contemporary and historical heath research. Now, I have settled down with my partner. In my spare time I like playing with our dog, making food, baking (and eating) cake and other sugary goodness, as well as playing card and boardgames.