This activity lays a framework for understanding the need for assessing community exposure to public health inequities. The data source section identifies the sources. The methodology section takes the students through the steps of creating a formula to use with the data source types.

" This course does not seek to provide answers to ethical questions. Instead, the course hopes to teach students two things. First, how do you recognize ethical or moral problems in science and medicine? When something does not feel right (whether cloning, or failing to clone) ‰ŰÓ what exactly is the nature of the discomfort? What kind of tensions and conflicts exist within biomedicine? Second, how can you think productively about ethical and moral problems? What processes create them? Why do people disagree about them? How can an understanding of philosophy or history help resolve them? By the end of the course students will hopefully have sophisticated and nuanced ideas about problems in bioethics, even if they do not have comfortable answers."

This multidisciplinary seminar addresses fundamental issues in global health faced by community-based healthcare programs in developing countries. Students will broadly explore topics with expert lecturers and guided readings. Topics will be further illuminated with case studies from healthcare programs in urban centers of Zambia. Multidisciplinary teams will be formed to develop feasible solutions to specific health challenges posed in the case studies and encouraged to pursue their ideas beyond the seminar. Possible global health topics include community-based AIDS/HIV management, maternity care, health diagnostics, and information technology in patient management and tracking. Students from Medicine, Public Health, Engineering, Management, and Social Sciences are encouraged to enroll. No specific background experience is expected, but students should have some relevant skills or experiences.

This course explores the proper role of government in the regulation of the environment. It will help students develop the tools to estimate the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. These tools will be used to evaluate a series of current policy questions, including: Should air and water pollution regulations be tightened or loosened? What are the costs of climate change in the U.S. and abroad? Is there a "Race to the Bottom" in environmental regulation? What is "sustainable development"? How do environmental problems differ in developing countries? Are we running out of oil and other natural resources? Should we be more energy efficient? To gain real world experience, the course is scheduled to include a visit to the MIT cogeneration plant. We will also do an in-class simulation of an air pollution emissions market.

GEM4 VisionGEM4 has brought together researchers and professionals in major institutions across the globe with distinctly different, but complementary, expertise and facilities to address significant problems at the intersections of select topics of engineering, life sciences, technology, medicine and public health.GEM4 creates new models for interactions across scientific disciplinary boundaries whereby problems spanning the range of fundamental science to clinical studies and public health can be addressed on a global scale through strategic international partnerships.Through initial focus areas in cell and molecular biomechanics, and environmental health, in the context of select human diseases, GEM4 creates a global forum for the definition and exploration of grand challenges and scientific studies, for the cross-fertilization of ideas among engineers, life scientists and medical professionals, and for the development of novel educational tools.GEM4 ActivitiesGEM4 enables the brokering of engineers, life scientists and medical professionals with shared facilities and joint students and post-doctoral fellows to tackle major problems in the context of human health and diseases that call for state-of-the-art experimental and computational tools in cell and molecular mechanics, biology and medicine. Broad examples of problems addressed include:infectious diseases such as malaria,cancer,cardiovascular diseases,biomechanical origins of inflammation.In each of these areas, the initial emphasis has included (but will not be limited to) molecular, subcellular and cellular mechanics applied to biomedicine, where a single investigator or institution is not likely to have the full spectrum of expertise, infrastructure or resources available to cover fundamental molecular science all the way to clinical studies and societal implications. Currently, twelve institutions in North America, Europe and Asia participate in this effort as Core institutions, focusing on mechanistic studies, as well as novel methods for diagnostics, vaccines or drug development and delivery.Funds have been raised to provide a structure for coordinated studies from major organizations under the umbrella of GEM4. These funds are being used for:organization of major symposia/conferences specifically targeted at the theme areas of the initiative,training grants for student fellowships for the partner institutions,summer schools to develop teaching materials,the exchange of students and researchers,operations of a central secretariat for handling the administrative and infrastructure details for such interactions,maintenance of a web site for dissemination of information.

This course presents a unique and challenging perspective on the causes of human disease and mortality. The course focuses on analyses of major causes of mortality in the US since 1900: cancer cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes, infectious diseases. Students create analytical models to derive estimates for historically variant population risk factors and physiological rate parameters, and conduct analyses of familial data to separately estimate inherited and environmental risks. The course evaluates the basic population genetics of dominant, recessive and non-deleterious inherited risk factors.

The website provides data on children under five that are: overweight, stunted, underweight, and wasted (in respective data sets). The sets can be searched by country where figures are given for year, percent of males, females, and combined.

Introducing public health ethics poses two special challenges. First, it is a relatively new field that combines public health and practical ethics. Its unfamiliarity requires considerable explanation, yet its scope and emergent qualities make delineation difficult. Moreover, while the early development of public health ethics occurred in a western context, its reach, like public health itself, has become global. A second challenge, then, is to articulate an approach specific enough to provide clear guidance yet sufficiently flexible and encompassing to adapt to global contexts. Broadly speaking, public health ethics helps guide practical decisions affecting population or community health based on scientific evidence and in accordance with accepted values and standards of right and wrong. In these ways, public health ethics builds on its parent disciplines of public health and ethics. This dual inheritance plays out in the definition the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers of public health ethics: “A systematic process to clarify, prioritize, and justify possible courses of public health action based on ethical principles, values and beliefs of stakeholders, and scientific and other information” (CDC 2011). Public health ethics shares with other fields of practical and professional ethics both the general theories of ethics and a common store of ethical principles, values, and beliefs. It differs from these other fields largely in the nature of challenges that public health officials typically encounter and in the ethical frameworks it employs to address these challenges. Frameworks provide methodical approaches or procedures that tailor general ethical theories, principles, values, and beliefs to the specific ethical challenges that arise in a particular field. Although no framework is definitive, many are useful, and some are especially effective in particular contexts. This chapter will conclude by setting forth a straightforward, stepwise ethics framework that provides a tool for analyzing the cases in this volume and, more importantly, one that public health practitioners have found useful in a range of contexts. For a public health practitioner, knowing how to employ an ethics framework to address a range of ethical challenges in public health—a know-how that depends on practice—is the ultimate take-home message.

Addresses relationship between technology-related problems and the law applicable to work environment. National Labor Relations Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act. Toxic Substances Control Act, state worker's compensation, and suits by workers in the courts discussed. Problems related to occupational health and safety, collective bargaining as a mechanism for altering technology in the workplace, job alienation, productivity, and the organization of work addressed. Prior courses or experience in the environmental, public health, or law-related areas.

Infectious diseases represent a serious global public health problem. They have the potential to kill millions of people, whether they emerge naturally as outbreaks or pandemics, or deliberately through bioterrorism. Some examples of diseases caused by emerging pathogens are the Bubonic Plague, Toxoplasmosis, African Sleeping Sickness, and Chagas Disease. Each day, infectious disease scientists serve on the front lines protecting us from such threats. In this course students will learn how to design and critique experiments through the discussion of primary research articles that explore the molecular basis of disease caused by emerging pathogens. This course is one of many Advanced Undergraduate Seminars offered by the Biology Department at MIT. These seminars are tailored for students with an interest in using primary research literature to discuss and learn about current biological research in a highly interactive setting. Many instructors of the Advanced Undergraduate Seminars are postdoctoral scientists with a strong interest in teaching.

Exploration of the changes and continuities in the lives of South Asian women. Using gender as a lens, examine how politics of race, class, caste, and religion have affected women in South Asian countries, primarily in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Current debates within South Asian women's history illustrate the issues and problems that arise in re-writing the past from a gendered perspective. Primary documents, secondary readings, films, newspaper articles, and the Internet.