# Individual and Neighborhood Vulnerability to the Spanish Flu

> **NIH NIH R21** · BROWN UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $199,375

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
This is a study of mortality risk in the deadliest pandemic in the 20th Century, the Spanish flu of 1918, in two of
the U.S. cities with the highest number of fatalities, New York and Philadelphia. It has four main aims. Aim 1 is
to examine mortality from the Spanish flu at the neighborhood scale in these cities. Aim 2 is to extend the
ecological analysis with multilevel models including individual-level predictors. Aim 3 is to compare the
patterns of influenza/pneumonia mortality during the pandemic with mortality in the same period in the previous
year, and Aim 4 is to compare patterns between cities. Few studies of pandemics have gone beyond analyzing
mortality data at the level of whole cities to consider spatial variation within cities, and there have been none
that examined risk of mortality in a pandemic using multilevel models. In this project, drawing on individual
death records, attention can be directed to specific neighborhoods and mortality risk of their residents. The
study will show how personal characteristics such as age, gender, race, nativity, and social class affect risk of
mortality in a multilevel model that includes similar characteristics measured at a neighborhood scale and also
incorporates spatial relationships among neighborhoods.
These aims will be addressed through analysis of a new data set with several innovative components. 1)
Transcription of all death certificates during fall 1917 and fall 1918 in New York and Philadelphia including the
person’s name, age, race, gender, address, cause of death, date of death, occupation, and parents’ names
and place of birth. 2) Geocoding of addresses in a historically accurate GIS system, so that persons can be
linked to their neighborhoods. 3) Use of 100% census microdata from 1920 to create measures of
neighborhood characteristics, construct a comparison sample of flu survivors, and glean information about the
households of those who died. These data will allow the project to probe the independent effects of various
individual risk factors while also examining neighborhood differences and spatial patterns in mortality.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10835038
- **Project number:** 5R21HD111672-02
- **Recipient organization:** BROWN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** John R Logan
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $199,375
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-05-01 → 2025-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10835038

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10835038, Individual and Neighborhood Vulnerability to the Spanish Flu (5R21HD111672-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-02 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10835038. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*