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AFRO-NETS> Epidemiology Course on the Internet (44)
Epidemiology Course on the Internet (44)
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BMJ paper and supercourse
Friends,
The quantity of mail talking about the supercourse is increasing. I
know that many of us are starting to sink under all the email we have
been receiving. The comments we have been receiving so far have been
wonderful. I will not go over all of them, but just highlight a few...
Micheline Beaudry suggested that the focus should be less on medical
education and more on health. This is a very good point.
Tom Jefferson from the UK liked the way we are trying to do authorship,
and had excellent comments. He also offered to edit the paper "as an
English speaker" which was really funny. I have never known an English
person who like the way Pittsburghers wrote!!! We are most definitely
going to have Tom translate it from "American English to the Queens
English" so that we can submit it to the British Medical Journal...
Thanks Tom.
Hiko Tamashiro from WHO had excellent comments on the transparent na-
ture of the Internet, and the equality on the net which faculty and
students from developed and developing countries can meet and learn
from each other... They were beautiful thoughts
Gary Goldbaum from NIH had a very interesting point as I was concerned
that if we are teaching 65,000 in a single course, what would become of
our jobs... he pointed out that lectures would move away from the role
of lecturers to that of mentors. brilliant idea... all of us get a bit
tired teaching the same introductory class over and over, here we can
be mentors to a broad group of students across the world, we would be
interlaced mentoring hundreds of students. It is a great concept, and
almost a paper unto itself.
Pai Penttinen from Finland had a broad conceptualisation for what we
are doing... the beginnings of a global epidemiologic data base built
from the local to global level which would interface with global epi-
demiologic training... we have been thinking of this also, but at a
somewhat different angle, that of the public health global architecture
that Francois Sauer has coined. This too could lead to a fascinating
series of papers to explore this architecture, starting as Pai sug-
gested with mortality data potentially.
I got some excellent thoughts from Peter Allebeck this morning from
Sweden, with some brilliant thoughts to ponder. He suggested that we
perhaps were not writing broad enough... as he indicated that health is
global, HIV, drug addiction, etc... but our training and educational
systems are all very local, health in our own countries. What we can do
with this is to help to broaden both the students, and our own, con-
cepts of public health and prevention to the global scale. He recom-
mended that we really push to obtain case examples from all countries
across the world... so that we further create this global information
lattice.
Several other people questioned my grammar (it was my 3rd grade teacher
who was to blame)... it is interesting that all those questing it were
from countries related to the UK... hmmmm.... but they were right, and
there were excellent specific comments by Vincent Kenny, from Ireland
and others.
There were many other responses almost all of them positive. We very
much appreciate this. Deb Aaron and I are rewriting the paper.
We will take comments from you until Dec 22 at 24:00 Eastern Daylight
time...
Oh, yes, Aziz Ismail did not like the title. It has no pizzaz, so if
you can think of a better title, it would be great.
Thanks for all you help. We want to get this out by Dec 25 to the BMJ
if at all possible.
If you are interested writing about the supercourse for your specific
area, we would very much like to help you write papers, you, of course
can be first author...e.g. Supercourse and Nutrition, Supercourse and
child health, Development of a German Supercourse, Teeth and the super-
course, application of a supercourse to the food a drug administration,
IBM, IT and supercourse technology, development of a supercourse for
the former Soviet Union, application of the supercourse in the Peoples
Republic of China, Health Economics, Global Health, and Global Train-
ing, a Latin American Hemispheric training program, Pan-Africa public
health training, Multinational drug companies, Pharmaco epidemiology,
and multinational training... These are just random thoughts, but would
make great articles, and form the foundation of the supercourse in your
area... we would be pleased to help.
Thanks again for the wonderful comments...
Ron, Deb, Akira
mailto:[email protected]
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