Global Disease Masterclass Specialization

The Global Diseases Masterclass is part of the full-degree Masters of Public Health that the School of Public Health. By the end of this specialisation, our aim is that students will be able to critically apply epidemiological concepts to major global diseases and be able to appraise and recommend policy options to combat them.

Global Diseases Masterclass: Global Disease Distribution In this course, we will introduce students to the most important trends and pattern in health and disease on a global scale. We will look at how health has improved over time, examine the trends for the future and look at between and within-country inequality in health. We will look at the methods that lie behind those statistics and think about different ways in which health can be conceptualised and measured. The course ends by considering the reason that might lie behind the patterns that we’ve pointed out and introducing the distinction between direct and structural interventions.The course ends by considering the reasons that might lie behind the patterns that we’ve described and introducing the concept of structural interventions.

This course is all about infectious diseases. We’ve selected four disease areas — HIV, Malaria, Emerging Infectious Diseases (Ebola and Zika), and TB — and we will go through each in turn. We’ve selected these diseases because they span a range of different types of disease and allow us to look at important issues that relevance of other diseases too. We will look at each disease in the same way: we begin by looking at the aetiology and epidemiology of the diseases. We then show how data on this disease can be used to understand important trends and patterns. We then focus on the interventions that can be used to address that disease - typically spanning both prevention and treatment - and consider how policies have been developed to address the disease. We finish by reflecting on the whole topic area of the disease with an external expert.