Examining mortality patterns in the epidemic emergence of poliomyelitis in southern Ontario, Canada (1900-1937)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines patterns in poliomyelitis mortality in Wentworth and York Counties of southern Ontario, Canada, from 1900 to 1937. This period marked polio’s shift from endemic to epidemic status. It was also a time of shifting social, cultural, demographic, and economic patterns. Contemporaries struggled to understand polio’s epidemiology, and even today, with the poliovirus on the verge of global eradication, models to explain its changing patterns and impact continue to be revised. This thesis uses both qualitative and quantitative data collected from a variety of archival sources, including death, birth, and marriage registrations, census records, and newspaper articles, among other records. This information was used to build a geodatabase which forms the basis for analyses of mortality patterns in relation to age and sex, illness duration, seasonality, nativity, birthplace, ethnicity, and religion. Further analyses included family size, birth order, socioeconomic status, and place of residence patterns. Examined in the context of Wentworth and York Counties in the early 20th century, the results both reveal a local pattern to polio’s epidemic emergence and provide a means to test broader hypotheses regarding polio’s epidemiological patterns. Specifically, results from this study were compared to the expectations of the intensive-exposure and cross-sex transmission hypotheses proposed by Nielsen and colleagues. Among the most important contributions of this thesis are the results showing a pattern of change over the study period, with two distinct stages. Stage One (1910 to 1927) is characterized by an equal sex ratio and a median known family size of four. Stage Two (1928 to 1937) is characterized by excess male deaths and a median known family size of two. These results link polio mortality patterns to demographic and ecological shifts in the early 20th century and confirm that there is still much to learn from the history of this disease.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".