Supercourse Newsletter, July 8th
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Dear Friends,
Much has been happening in the past several weeks. We have been very
pleased with the input we have received from you.
The second lecture on bioterrorism by noble prize winner Joshua Led-
erberg is wonderful and it is finished. Faina Linkov has been working
closely with him on the development of the content and recently we
received his approval for distributing the lecture to the Super-
course's Global Audience. In the next week or so this lecture will be
distributed to you for your comments. All of us would like to thank
Dr. Lederberg for his contribution to the Supercouse.
Understanding Sept. 11:
The project for the development of a Sept. 11 lecture focusing on
Terrorism is moving along extremely well. Fan Zhou drafted the lec-
ture, and we sent it out to many of you. The response has been ex-
tremely positive, with over 40 faculty of the Supercourse writing
comments to us. It was actually somewhat difficult to write a lecture
as amazingly little is known about the epidemiology of terrorism.
Most of the materials on the web is political with little good data.
We are very pleased with all your comments as we were able to have
this looked at from many different dimensions to make it as scien-
tific as possible. The main overriding issue was that the lecture was
a bit too "American". We have changed this a little bit, as well as
giving instructions that this is a PowerPoint lecture and that the
teachers should include local examples.
We have been pleased to work with Sue Ann Goodwin, Mary McGuire and
Mike, Andy, and Paul from local school districts in Pittsburgh. We
are creating a lesson plan for the lecture. We will send out only one
lecture, and indicate say if you are teaching 4th grade that you
should use slides 15, 18 and 21 or something like that. In this man-
ner, the size of the material that we will send people is quite
small. It was interesting that Mike indicated that the 4th graders
would be most interest in our risk assessment estimates. That was
quite a surprise.
We would like you to think about how you could reach the teachers in
your country, as in a few weeks we will be sending to you the lec-
tures that you can distribute.
The lectures are being translated as we speak into Arabic, Japanese,
Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish. Please let us know if you
would like to translate the lectures. It will take about 3 hours.
American Journal of Epidemiology published a most interesting paper
on "What contributes to a successful career in Epidemiology in the
United States. (Amer J Epid 2002,156: 60-67). In this article the
tree leading skills and competencies in epidemiology for the next 10
years were identified as
1) skills in multidisciplinary teams,
2) Skills in using modern information technologies, and
3) skills in working with culturally diverse populations.
It is rather exciting as our network and the Supercourse covers all
of these issues.
Other News:
We (Ron, Jan, Tom) went to Egypt to teach a course on epidemiology
for the Ministry of Health and to see the pyramids. There is consid-
erable interest in the building of an Egyptian/Arabic Supercourse. In
the next newsletter we will describe the exciting events in Egypt.
Lectures:
We cannot forget the lectures...and we have not. We now have over
800. We wish you could all come to out next lunch to celebrate lec-
ture 800.
The International Epidemiology Society meeting will be in August this
year. Ron, Eugene, Akira, Eun-Ryoung and John Last will be present-
ing. Please let us know if you are coming. We are planning a Super-
course get-together in Montreal.
We hope you are having a wonderful July! It is getting quite warm
here.
Ron, Akira, Faina, Mita, Fan, Eunryoung, Eugene, Julia, Abed,
Beatriz, Deb, Tom, Rania
If you would like to join in the global effort to distribute the ter-
rorism lectures or comment on this newsletter, please send a note to
<ronlaporte@aol.com>
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