AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter, December 8, 2001

[Ron Laporte <super3+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter, December 8, 2001
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http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/

Dear Friends,

What day is today? We all now know....

Jan. 1 is coming, and you can start to use your calendar. My calendar 
is on my door, and it is a nice feeling being reminded of the Super-
course every morning.

Some of you expressed an interest in changing the calendar such as 
including the holidays in your country, as well as putting pictures 
of your children into the calendar. If you have difficulty doing 
this, please write to us.

You should have all received your calendar. There may have been some 
difficulty sending comments back. Please feel free to send us a note 
as to how we can make it better.

Please forward the calendar to people who would enjoy it, such as 
your mother if she is an epidemiologist, you students, and of course, 
your Ministry of Health.

We have had some wonderful comments about the calendar. One by Tom 
Hinchcliffe made us feel really good. "Boffo! You and your team seem 
constitutionally incapable of producing anything boring. Thank good-
ness". What a great note. Please in the future, if you see us doing 
anything really dull, please let us know. Life is too short to be 
boring!!!

Holiday CDs

Our Holiday CD is now being copied. We plan to send these out in the 
next few weeks. This is our best CD. We have over 500 lectures in 
different languages. We are learning as we go along. On the outside 
of the CD we have the instructions as to how to install the CD. It 
will be much easier to use. Eun Ryoung Sa from our group is becoming 
quite the recording studio artist. She as well as everyone should be 
congratulated for their efforts.

Egypt: We have been discussing the supercourse with the MOH, His Ex-
cellency Professor Sallam. The Ministry is very forward thinking. 
They have expressed an interest in translating the full course into 
Arabic. We would then leave the Arabic version on their server, and 
we all would have a Mirror server. We plan to hold an Epidemiology 
training course next year in Egypt with distant sites in the region.

Ukraine: We had a wonderful visit from Drs. Latyshev, Valutsina, 
Homenko and Konovalova from Donetsk and Kramatovsk in the Ukraine. 
The Ukraine is fascinating as in only a 4 years period the Internet 
hosts has gone from 9,000 to almost 45,000. In addition, there are 
some major public health issues in the Ukraine, to which improved 
prevention education can help. We look forward to working with the 
people from the Ukraine. Also, it is important to see that some of 
our friends in the Supercourse come and visit with us! It was nice, 
you should come also.

Global Health Network University: 

One of our first publications in the British Medical Journal [*] ar-
gued for the development of a Global Health Network University as 
there is a critical need for people with Master's and Ph.D. degrees 
in epidemiology and public health world wide. We abandoned that idea 
with the Supercourse. Perhaps we should reconsider it. We would value 
your ideas of how this could be done. Ideally we would like a Super-
course School of Public Health (SSPH) to 
1) have no or very low tuition, 
2) partner with schools in countries rather than replace them, 
3) have a reputation similar to Johns Hopkins, All India Medical 
   School, Tokyo University or Cambridge, 
4) have the existing supercourse faculty as the faculty of the degree 
   granting Supercourse.

The burden on the global faculty has to be extremely low, or the 
faculty would need to be compensated. To do this we need a very, very 
different model. One possibility is dual degrees with local centers. 
We would very much appreciate your out of the box thinking of how we 
can develop a cheap, but extremely high quality global training pro-
gram in epidemiology/public health. We need to train more people in 
public health around the world.
 
Utilization:

The supercourse has been extremely successful networking high-level 
primarily academic scientists with over 4,700 collaborators. We also 
have been quite successful in extracting lectures, with now over 560 
collected. In addition, the distribution of the supercourse has been 
amazing, with 32 mirrored servers, and CDs that now reach over 40,000 
faculty members. It is time to start to promote the utilization of 
the supercourse lectures. We would appreciate your advice as to how 
this can be done.

Technical Developments:

In 2002 we plan to make the Supercourse more user friendly. We will 
move away from the lecture as the primary information module to that 
of the slides. We are outsourcing our web programming to India. We 
plan to have you be able to search on "diabetes epidemiology" and 
pull out all the slides on diabetes epidemiology. The slides will 
then be downloaded into a PowerPoint slide sorter where one can ma-
nipulate the slides any way you would like. Each slide will be 
branded with the author's name, affiliation, and the Supercourse 
logo. 

We also plan to establish template courses, thus if one were to give 
course in basic epidemiology, there would be a course that you could 
work from.

Best regards from Pittsburgh There was no snow at all in Nov. first 
time in years that this has happened. The world is heating up.

Ron, Akira, Eun Ryoung, Faina, Mita, Fan, Grace, Eugene, Abed, 
Beatriz, Tom, Deb


[*] Global health network university proposed 
    BMJ 1994; 309:737

EDITOR, - Recently we pointed out the potential of the information 
superhighway to become a critical factor in improving global health 
in the next century.[1] One important aspect of the telecommunica-
tions revolution is to enable distance education. We believe that it 
is time to establish a global training programme in public health 
through the capabilities that the internet provides and are enlisting 
faculty and students to join this effort. 

Developing countries are facing the twin burdens of chronic disease 
and infectious disease. As the result of increased longevity, chronic 
diseases have emerged, yet infectious diseases have not been elimi-
nated. Recently a World Bank report argued that cost effective public 
health measures represent a primary means for disease prevention and 
a reduction of the enormous cost of disease.[2]

The establishment of public health measures requires trained public 
health staff. Many developing countries have no choice but to send 
students abroad for training. This is enormously expensive - tuition, 
fees, and stipends at an American school of public health for a two 
year MPH degree cost over $80 000, but unfortunately the costs are 
higher as more than 50% of students do not return home after complet-
ing their degree. Thus, increasing the number of foreign trained MPH 
staff in a country requires an investment of over $160 000. In addi-
tion, we are in a global community of health, yet our students in de-
veloping and developed countries alike have little international ex-
perience. 

Until now, a student could acquire the public health tools of access 
to information, the network of students, the availability of leading 
scientists, and international experience by few means other than 
through foreign training. Now, however, potentially equivalent inter-
national expertise and public health care education can be provided 
through the internet, which can reach broad audiences and avoid relo-
cation and other unnecessary expenses. 

We are in the process of establishing a telecommunications based pub-
lic health training program. This program will grant degrees in pub-
lic health, as well as provide internationally recognised certifi-
cates for those students receiving their public health degrees from 
their home institutions. Students can also take courses to gain in-
ternational experience. We are seeking expert members of faculty of 
public health in schools, ministries of health, and other areas who 
could serve as mentors and instructors for a new "metaschool" of pub-
lic health that could train students through the internet on the ba-
sis of how we learn through networks.[3]

The first step of this is to identify potential faculty in epidemiol-
ogy and other disciplines from schools of public health who are fac-
ile on the internet who would like to teach in this metaschool. The 
second step is to network, across country boundaries, young people 
starting their training in public health so as to start a global 
training dialogue among students themselves and the faculty. The 
third step is to begin the degree granting programme. 

Students and faculty interested in forming a global health network 
university (GHNet-U), please contact one of us below. 
R E LaPorte, S Akazawa, E Boostrom, M Campos, T Gamboa, R Gooch, H 
Lee, I Libman, E Marler, K Roko, F Sauer, N Tajima, W Wiebe 

[1] LaPorte RE, Akazawa S, Hellmonds P, Boostrom E, Gamboa C, Gooch 
    T, et al. Global public health and the information superhighway. BMJ 
    1994;308:1651-2. (25 June.) [Full Text] 
[2] World Bank. Development report, 1993: investing in health. Ox-
    ford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 
[3] Riel M. Global education through learning circles. In: Harasim L, 
    ed. Global networks. London: MIT Press, 1993: 221-6.

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