Supercourse Newsletter, 25 March 2005
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The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life
what you learned this afternoon.
-- Anonymous
Golden Lecture of Global Health
We are moving fast on the NIH Fogarty grant.
A primary approach we are using in the grant is that of the
�Golden Lecture�. Faina Linkov a few years ago pushed globally a
�golden� lecture of prevention. It was distributed to 138 coun-
tries, and probably greater than 300,000 students. We published
this in the Lancet, below. It was amazing that a single lecture
could teach so many students. We are planning to do the same by
developing a Golden Lecture on Global Health. This is designed
to be taught to students in many different disciplines, to in-
form them and get them interested in Global Health. We realized
in developing this that most of us do not teach lectures on
other disciplines in our courses. The reason is obviously, there
is an enormous barrier to teach across areas, say between epide-
miology and history, despite the fact they are intertwined. For
me to teach about the history of diarrheal disease in the Franco
Prussian war would be extremely difficult, and would involved
perhaps 20 hours of preparation. However, if you were a faculty
member in environmental engineering, or rehabilitation sciences,
a lecture on global health might fit very well, but the hurdle
needed to prepare and teach it is too great, so we rarely teach
outside our discipline. We thus rarely teach about global
health.
However if we push a template lecture to you on global health,
you could teach with little burden, and you could teach about
global health very well. This is what we are planning to do in
the grant.
According to our estimates potentially 240,000 students world
wide in many different disciplines will be taught from this Su-
percourse lecture of Golden Health.
Taking this one step further, a faculty member from the School
of Nursing could add 5-8 slides on global research in nursing
and we then have a lecture on International nursing research
that could be �re-distributed�, or slides on Hispanic health, or
rehabilitation science. We can be sort of like a Global Health
Lecture Worm, a good �Worm� that burrows its information on
global health into the courses of the world. Soni Dodani is de-
veloping this lecture and we will distribute it to you.
The Lectures heard �round the world�
Robbie Ali just told us something cool. He was in Indonesia in
Northern Sumatra. He walked into an office, and someone was us-
ing the Supercourse. Isn�t that a buzz??
Basketball: It is very exciting times in the NCAA basketball
tournament. The teams have been whittled down from 84 to 8.
Pittsburgh, sadly, lost in their first game. My sister, Susan
Bennett, of Williamsville NY sent me a short video of THE most
amazing basketball shot ever made. It is truly incredible...
http://abfhm.free.fr/basket.htm
Best regards from Pittsburgh. Spring is close, but we have not
seen the sun since Feb. 2
April fools day: On April 1 we all must consider April Fools
day. This is a day when you play practical jokes on everyone you
know. If you tell practical jokes, please tell us.
Best guards from Golden Pittsburgh,
Ron, Faina, Mita, Soni, Eugene, Julia, Sue, Samar, Rania, Shai,
and Arin
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to
live forever.
-- Gandhi
Correspondence
Globalisation of prevention education: a golden lecture
Sir -- John S Yudkin and colleagues (Sept 6, p 822),1 argue that
teaching of international health to medical students in the UK
will help to provide a greater understanding of the global
trends of disease. Here, we describe how we gave a single lec-
ture on disease prevention to more than 75% of the countries of
the world.
Improvements in hygiene and in our knowledge of how to prevent
disease have led to a worldwide gain in life expectancy of 30
years over the 20th century. The way in which preventive medi-
cine is taught has, however, hardly changed. The importance of
disease prevention was recognised as early as the 5th Century AD
by Hippocrates of Cos. Hippocrates taught that a proper diet is
a necessity of health, and that climate has a profound effect on
both mind and body. In Greece, Sept 19 is celebrated as Hippo-
crates day, and in May, 2003, those involved in the Supercourse
Prevention project (http://www.pitt.edu/~super1), funded by the
US National Institutes of Health (NIH), suggested that the day
be used to spread worldwide the message of disease prevention.
As such, on Sept 19, we posted the "Golden Lecture of Preven-
tion" on the internet. The supercourse is an internet library of
lectures on prevention, shared for free by 10,000 members from
151 countries in the Global Health Network. The golden lecture
was designed to teach preventive approaches to health.
Leading researchers from more than 30 countries, including Rus-
sia, Nepal, Cuba, Armenia, and several Islamic states, partici-
pated in the creation of the lecture, which is especially impor-
tant for the developing world, where doctors and researchers are
struggling to find cost-effective ways to improve their popula-
tion's health.
We distributed the golden lecture to doctors, professors, pub-
lic-health professionals, and instructors by Sept 1, 2003, to be
read and taught until and on Hippocrates day. To improve access
to the lecture, we made two formats available. Over the next
several months, the lecture was translated into 12 languages,
including Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Indonesian, and
Croatian. All of these materials were uploaded to the Super-
course website at
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture/lec10511/index.htm. Overall,
the lecture was used in 136 of the 189 UN-recognised countries.
Our aim was to reach educators in as many countries as possible.
We believe the time has come to globalise training in health and
share our knowledge.
We thank the members of the Global Health Network for their con-
tribution. Please contact FL to obtain a copy of the Golden lec-
ture of prevention and a free supercourse with 1038 lectures.
*Faina Linkov, Eugene Shubnikov, Abdullatif S Husseini, Mita
Lovalekar, Ronald LaPorte