Supercourse Newsletter, September 9, 2002
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Dear Friends,
10,000 faculty, 1000 lectures and 150 countries by Halloween...Can it
be done?? Yes
We want to have 10,000 faculty, 1,000 lectures in 150 countries by
the end of the year. We can do it, tell your friends about the Super-
course, enroll your children and parents, they too need to know about
prevention. Contact people you know in the countries that we do not
have. This week has been great, we are up now to 858 lectures, only
142 left to go in 50 days. It will be close, but we will do it. Don't
you want to be one of the 1,000 best lectures in prevention? It would
be great if you were a part of a global legacy to the world?
Peter Sims joined us from Papua New Guinea, bringing our total number
of countries to 139!!! Please, please, please, tell your friends in
North Korea, St. Kitts, Liechtenstein and other countries to join the
Supercourse. We will gladly send you a list of the countries that we
are missing.
The Supercourse has become one of the largest and best known projects
in Global Health due to the Internet and you.
We just received 10,000 mailing forms, and will send 2-3 weeks fill-
ing these out so that you receive the CD. If you DO NOT want to re-
ceive a CD, please send a note to <super2@pitt.edu>. If we do not
have your mailing address, please register you address on the Super-
course Home page at:
http://www.pitt.edu/~super2/
Remember, remember, remember...
There are two conditions for receiving the best 1,000 lecture CD in
prevention.
1) you do not sell the CD and
2) we ask you to make copies for at least 5 people. The Supercourse
CD is a gift that is meant to be given.
9/11
http://www.pitt.edu/AFShome/s/u/super1/public/html/sept11/
This week will bring back memories to the world. It is very memorable
to us in Pittsburgh, as a plane crashed in Shanksville, PA just 100
km away.
We wanted to discuss this with you, thank you all, and tell the story
of our epidemiology of terrorism. The Supercourse was never set up to
deal with terrorism, our roots are in diabetes epidemiology, but it
was thrust upon us. Humberto Guerra, a very good friend from Peru
wrote a lecture 6 months before 9/11 on the epidemiology of Anthrax
for the Supercourse. It is one of the best lectures on the web. In
building our network a friend suggested that we think about bioter-
rorism. We wrote a paper that appeared on Sept. 1, 2001 in the Lancet
infectious disease (2001;1: 125-127) where we argued that the exist-
ing public health systems in the world were like the Maginote line,
they were too slow to prevent or mitigate terrorism. For example, an-
thrax sensors were vapor ware, improved laboratories although impor-
tant for public health, were like improving autopsies to reduce homi-
cides, improved surveillance is always important, but an increase in
identification of cases by 1-2 days could hardly save lives. Also, if
bioterrorism were to be used as a weapon of mass destruction, it
would be rather obvious.
Instead, we argued that building a global neighborhood watch, where
"neighbors watched over our neighbors on the Internet" (not spying on
neighbors) would benefit all of us. US government officials were not
impressed, sadly, on Sept. 11 we were proven to be right. We also
felt that by us being "neighborly" worldwide and watching out for
each other, this could form a backbone for global health.
What is most memorable about Sept. 12, is that we received over 200
messages from our Supercourse friends wanting to know how we were,
and to help us. Friends from Saudi Arabia, Canada, Egypt, South Af-
rica, Germany, Israel, Japan, China and many, many other countries
contacted us, and were worried about us. It touched our hearts. These
people, you, will remain our friends forever.
We wanted to give something back. One area that very much concerned
us was that bioterrorism is really not about the epidemiology of an
emerging disease, rather terrorism in general is about the epidemiol-
ogy of fear. We published a paper this June in the Lancet Infectious
disease titled Bioterrorism, the Epidemiology of Fear (2001;1:125-7)
based upon a suggestion by Anne Ronan from Australia. We were most
concerned with the fears that are generated in the children of the
world.
We decided that what we could do was to provide a set of lectures on
the epidemiology on terrorism for the children of the world to try
and understand terrorism to reduce potentially reduce their fears. We
wanted the best possible science and epidemiology and we wanted these
lectures to be politically neutral. We tried very hard not to make
this a US lecture.
Faina Linkov worked with me in this project. We first developed a
lecture called "Understanding Sept. 11", the second was by a Nobel
Prize winner, Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D. on bioterrorism.
We constructed the first lecture. It had two simple messages designed
to reduce fear. The first is that there is a long history of terror-
ism from as early as 50 AD as many ethnic groups attacked the Roman
Armies at the beginning of this century, leading to a crumbling of
the empire. The major point was that terrorist attacks are not new.
The second was that the risk of dying from a terrorist attack was
small based upon the epidemiology. We first "sanitized" our lecture
by distributing it to our own Supercourse group which consists of
people from all major religions in the world, as well as collabora-
tors from countries such as Russia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Uganda the
US and elsewhere. Any point found offensive was taken out of the lec-
ture.
Following this we distributed this to you to comment upon. We re-
ceived over 50 responses, once again, if anything was offensive for
whatever reason, it was taken out. We then had lesson plans written
for the lecture for 4th and 11th grade children.
We then had this lecture translated into Japanese, Korean, Russian,
Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and other languages.
In constructing the lecture we rapidly discovered two important
facts. The first is that there is very little epidemiology and sci-
ence associated with terrorism. The second is that this is a very
difficult area to talk about scientifically as there is much more
emotion than science. Not infrequently, one group's terrorist was an-
other group's patriot.
We have decided to move forward and present the lectures for you in
the Supercourse to distribute across your country, and to use. Feel
free to remove anything perceived to be offensive to people in your
country. The history and epidemiology are well documented. These are
as clean politically as possible as we could judge, but we may have
missed something.
We would appreciate if you could make these lectures known in your
country. We do ask, however, that you do not politicize any of the
lectures, and only discuss the epidemiology and science as we want
the best science provided worldwide. We want the Supercourse to be as
politically neutral as possible.
Please provide further comments about the lectures, as we want the
best epidemiologic evaluation of terrorism.
Thank You.
To end this newsletter, we wanted again to thank all of you, our
friends. We are discovering that having 10,000 people from 139 coun-
tries working together can improve global health AND it may even help
to improve global peace.
Global Health, Global Peace.
Ron, Faina, Eugene, Akira, Mita, Abed, Beatriz, Rania, Soni, Eun Ry-
oung, Fred, Tom, Deb
If you would like copies of the Lancet papers on terrorism, or if you
would like to discuss this newsletter, send a note to:
Ron LaPorte <Ronlaporte@aol.com>
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