Epidemics I

Week 1: Epidemics: Past, Present and Future

• What is epidemic?
• How epidemics of infectious disease arise from historic transitions?
• Why novel emerging infectious diseases continue to arise?
• Emerging infectious disease, re-emerging infectious disease and zoonosis
• Factors leading to infectious disease emergence and re-emergence (microbial factors, climate and weather, changes in ecosystem and land use, human demographics, migrations and behaviour, international travel and commerce, technology, industry and intensive animal husbandry, breakdown in public health due to poverty, wars, natural disasters, and bioterrorism)
• Regions with higher risk of future emerging infectious disease and estimated economic costs of emerging infectious disease

Week 2: Discussion on Ebola and Zika Outbreak, and Supplementary Module on Next Generation Informatics for Global Health

• How to prepare for the next epidemic?
• How to allocate our resources among our fights against different pathogens?
• How should we channel our resources?
• Vaccines
• Antimicrobial resistance
• Supplementary module: towards digital pathogen surveillance: a very bumpy, winding road

Week 3: Ecology, Evolution and Emergence of Infectious Diseases

• Ecology of infectious diseases
• Emerging infectious diseases at the human-animal interface
• What is phylogenetic tree?
• How to use phylogenetic trees to study an epidemic of infectious disease?
• Emergence of highly pathogenic H5N1 Avian Influenza virus in Asia
• Emergence of the H7N9 Influenza A virus in china
• Swine Influenza and the 2009 pandemic H1N1

Week 4: Discussion on Ebola Outbreak, and Supplementary Module on Next Generation Informatics for Global Health

• Ebola in the wider context
• Border controls
• Is stopping bushmeat the answer?
• How should we use experimental treatments and vaccines?
• Should we centralise care and enforce lockdowns?
• Will Ebola become airborne?
• Will Ebola be become a huge human pandemic like HIV?
• Supplementary module: global variation in risk of influenza virus emergence

Week 5: Medical Detective: Bug Hunting in Epidemics

• Discovery of a novel microbe: first suspicion
• Finding the cause of interstitial pneumonia
• The identification of the novel virus associated with this infectious pneumonia
• Proof of association & causation: is SARS coronavirus really the cause of SARS?
• Control of emerging infections depends on: control at the source
• Alert: coronavirus as the cause of emerging infectious diseases!
• Supplementary module: using genetic data at multiple scales to understand constraints on viral evolution