Contagions in 2014

From a 2014 post on 20th century art. This work by Julian Hoke Harris is found on the Fulton County Health Services building in Atlanta, GA.

Time for a year end assessment. Not looking forward to this one because it was a slow year here at Contagions. I only had 22 posts in the last year bringing the total for the blog up to 182. Still, thanks largely to these archived posts, I had 110,000 visitors last year. That is incredible! Thank you for reading over the last year and for finding old posts worth returning for! All five of my top posts for the year, were old ones!  Ebola’s Chain of Infection was the most popular new post with 1,882 views, followed by The Paleomicrobiology of Malarial Detection with 1,405 visits.

Resolutions for 2015:

• Make blogging a habit again; post more than twice a month.
• Update a nearly five year old post that is consistently in my top five of the year.
• Loosen up a bit and diversify the topics more.

I started this blog to collect some thoughts and observations on the intersection history and infectious disease. Since then I’ve tried to find ways to apply modern scientific observations to historical problems, and I will continue to do that – even if I’m the only one who sees the connection! I had the good fortune to begin blogging when paleomicrobiology was really beginning to mature and I’ll keep my eye on developments there too. There is the potential for this to be an exciting year for the intersection of history and science. Fingers crossed that there will be synergy. So I hope that in 2015 I get back into the groove of where this blog began and I hope you will stay along for the ride.