Global Health Presentation information
Choose a partner and choose a global health topic
Some suggestions are below, but you are not limited to these options:
- Chagas
- Cholera
- Tuberculosis
- West Nile VIrus
- SARS
- Ebola
- Yellow fever
- Smallpox
- Dengue
- Typhoid
- Plague
- Pneumonia
- HTLV
- Rotavirus/Norovirus
- Leishmania
- Leprosy
- Measles
- Marburg
- Poliomyelitis
- HIV/AIDS
- Hepatitis
- Lassa Fever
- Malnutrition
- Malaria
- Trypanosomiasis
- Cancer
- Heart Disease
- HPV
- Influenza
- Vaccination
- Clean drinking water
- Other?
You will be responsible for 10-12 minutes of class time.
You may use any format you choose to educate the rest of the class about your topic (powerpoint, prezi, videos, discussion, games, etc)
Both partners should be involved in the presentation (one person shouldn’t simply “man the computer” and click through the slides)
Be sure to include references/sources for ALL of your research and images.
This assignment will count as 2 homework grades. There will be no homework quizzes during this period.
Some questions to address:
- In which countries is the disease/issue a problem?
- How is the disease spread (coughs, sexual contact, mosquitoes, eating monkeys, etc) and what living conditions contribute to its spread (contaminated drinking water, close living quarters with other people and/or animals, climate)?
- What is known about the causative agent (bacteria or virus) with respective to its life cycle and/or genetics?
- If a virus, what type of genome (RNA, DNA, single/double stranded) does it have? How many proteins are encoded in its genome? What do they encode? How does it get into the cell, replicate and evade an immune response?
- If bacteria, is it intracellular or extracellular? What is known about its genes—chromosomal and plasmids and how does it replicate? Are there antibiotic resistant strains?
- Why isn’t this disease/issue a problem in the US (or is it)?
- How is the disease treated? What limitations to the treatment are there in the countries where this is a problem? (refrigeration of medications, cost, lack of health care workers, cultural obstacles)
- What cutting edge medicines or technologies are currently under development for the treatment or prevention of this disease? How would you approach designing a drug or treatment for this disease?
Helpful websites:
World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/en/
Center for disease control
http://www.cdc.gov/
Global health atlas
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/rxforsurvival/series/atlas/index.html
(links to many health and economic statistics and videos for certain global health issues)
Medline (NIH)
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/
American Society for Microbiology, Microblibrary
http://www.microbelibrary.org/
Clinical trials
http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/
Primary journal articles
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed
Quote from Wikipedia:
“The main focus of prevention is eliminating the water-borne snails which are natural reservoirs for the disease. This is usually done by identifying bodies of water, such as lakes, ponds, etc., which are infested, forbidding or warning against swimming and adding niclosamide, acrolein, copper sulfate, etc., to the water in order to kill the snails.
Unfortunately for many years from the 1950s onwards, despite the efforts of some clinicians to get civil engineers to take it into account in their designs, civil engineeers built vast dam and irrigation schemes, oblivious of the fact that they would cause a massive rise in water-borne infections from schistosomiasis, even though with a little care the schemes could have been designed to minimise such effects, the detailed specifications having been laid out in various UN documents since the 1950s. Irrigation schemes can be designed to make it hard for the snails to colonise the water, and to reduce the contact with the local population. [4]
Failure for engineers to take this into account is an interesting example of the Relevance Paradox and is a good example of the failure of formal education and information systems to transmit tacit knowledge.”
Integrating Biology 