
The One Health Center team is excited to offer an innovative and interdisciplinary course about the Coronavirus pandemic. This course has been designed for undergraduate students with diverse backgrounds and ambitions who desire to know more about the international aspects of such a global event.
Every week, students will learn a variety of topics from different experts: from the “History of Pandemics” to “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic”, from "Epidemiology and Public Health in the time of COVID19” to “Pandemic communication” and more!
Students will also engage in different activities so to gain some experiential learning beyond the readings and the other materials assigned to succeed in class: e.g., interviews with culturally different others, visual blog, infographics, etc.
Course Outline
Modules | ||
W1 | Pandemics: a historical, linguistic and philosophical perspective | |
W2 | Circular Health and COVID-19 | |
W3 | Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic | |
W4 | Public Health | |
W5 | Epidemiology | |
W6 | Communication, "Fake News" and Credibility in a Pandemic |
Introduction to Systems Thinking in One Health video
First Lecture: Circular Health
The course will provide the space and time for students to discuss and engage with thought-provoking issues and seek novel approaches around the topic of advancing health as a system. It is designed for students from diverse background (humanities and sciences) who intend to expand their knowledge on the multiple dimensions of One Health. It will deliver an overview of tools and topics that are fundamental to understand why it is essential that we co-advance the health of humans, animals, plants and the environment.
Experts from UF and abroad will give invited lectures on tools and topics that will include semi-qualitative and qualitative methods in One Health research, health economics, principles of environmental law, network building, cultural and philosophical perspectives of health, medical geography, digital epidemiology and ethics. Health communication, managing conflict and leadership, behavioral change theories will also be addressed.
EGH will be offering this course in the Spring of 2020. It will be offered on Tuesdays during period 6 (12:50-1:40pm) and Thursdays during periods 6-7 (12:50-2:45pm).
Please contact the EGH Academic Specialist, Victoria Houghton, to register for this course.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated our fragility as a species. Humanity was attacked by a previously unknown virus that spread very rapidly, thanks to a speed of population mobility never seen in human history. It succeeded in creating the complete upset of the global socio-economic system. Such an event gives us an important stimulus to re-evaluate health in the context of a circular system that encompasses humans and the environment in which we live.
The key challenge we face is the discovery of novel paths to crisis resolution. Can we abandon the often cherished, but now obsolete, tendency to specialize in a restricted subject area? Can we re-discover the ability to become permeable to ideas that reach us from other disciplines and embrace a thinking-out-of-the-box approach? This book encourages the reader to consider this challenge via the telling of stories, both great and small.