Discussion 3
Prior to beginning work on this discussion forum, read Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 from the course text, Essentials of Environmental Health (3rd ed.). Additionally, read the following articles and websites:
How the Wise Men Brought Malaria to Africa (Links to an external site.), in New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People.
Elimination of Malaria in the United States (1947–1951) (Links to an external site.), from the CDC website
In The History of Malaria, an Ancient Disease (Links to an external site.), read the section “Eradication Efforts Worldwide: Success and Failure (1955–1978),” from the CDC website.
Before beginning your initial post, make certain you have completed the required reading from How the Wise Men Brought Malaria to Africa. Next, flash forward to the 21st century, where zoonotic and vector-borne diseases such as dengue fever, Zika, Lyme, and hantavirus are frequently described in the media.
For your initial post,
Look for in-depth media coverage, on the internet or news databases such as Newspaper Source Plus (Links to an external site.) and US Newstream (Links to an external site.) from the UAGC Library, that delves into the root causes of an outbreak.
Create a story of how today’s “wise men” have often caused these outbreaks with their or our fine intentions. Create your story in whatever style (or format) you wish but include all the pieces to understand the epidemiology and environmental components.
In other words, as long as you include the epidemiological pieces needed by your peers, you can write your entry in professional text, or get “out of the box” with a folk tale, audio narrative, or attempt something using multimedia.
Thinking outside the box or of possible scenarios is valuable to epidemiologists and public health workers as it allows us to contemplate what may occur in the future.
For example, here is a video (Links to an external site.) of Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of our nation’s leading infectious disease physicians, discussing how devastating a highly infectious respiratory illness could be to the world a mere 6 months prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Dr. Fauci was the leading expert on HIV and AIDS in the United States, and in early 2020 he was called upon to lead the taskforce to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
