Free course: Epidemics, Pandemics and Outbreaks (University of Pittsburgh)

• University of Pittsburgh.
• 16th March 2015.
• 4 Weeks long.

Diseases like Ebola, AIDS, and SARS pose a worldwide danger in our era of globalization, now that they can jump from one continent to another in just a few hours by hopping on a plane with their human hosts. When a disease outbreak occurs, preventing an epidemic requires intensive, coordinated international, national, and local efforts. Governments and international organizations have developed a set of public health policies and laws to enable them to fight these diseases with tools like emergency deployment of medical personnel, aggressive diagnosis and treatment protocols, vaccine and drug development, and quarantines.

This course will teach you about outbreaks of infectious diseases, how an outbreak can become an epidemic or pandemic, a toolkit of preventative measures and responses, and the laws and policies that enable those systems to operate. It features tiered instruction, with fun instruction using movies, games, and interviews to make learning easy for people with a general interest in the topic, followed by advanced instruction on a few hot topics for those who want to learn more.