Diabetes Supercourse Newsletter
February 2009
http://www.bibalex.org/diabetessupercourse/
Dear Friends,
A lot has been happening lately!
Last month, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) held The First BA Regional Workshop on the Epidemiology of Diabetes & Other Non-Communicable Diseases from 5-12 January 2009. We had more than 90 candidates apply, but unfortunately we were only able to host 37 students. The distinguished group of participants came from 10 different MENA countries. Presenters in the program were the head of Diabetes at WHO Geneva, the Head of NCDs at WHO EMRO. In addition, we had presentations from the Assistant Director General of Non-communicable diseases at WHO Geneva, the Director General of the Gulf Ministers of Health, and chairman of the MENA region for the IDF. We had NCD leaders as teachers from Egypt, Jordan, UAE and the US. It was amazing to have such a big group of NCD expert faculty all in one place!
We asked the students to teach at least one lecture within the next 6 months, and maybe hold a similar epidemiology training workshop within the couple of years in their country. That way thousands of students can be taught about diabetes and NCDs. Thus, we have established a nidus for the network of prevention, isn’t that great?! Not only that, but anyone can join in this amazing chain, because we have made all the PowerPoint presentations of the course available online, and shortly the videos will be available too. We thought it would be interesting to actually “see” how the experts taught their lectures!
The other amazing thing the parent Supercourse is trying to put together is to have these Diabetes Supercourse PowerPoints, along with the huge collection that the Epidemiology and Global Health Supercourse has (almost 3600 lectures), put on DVD and distributed to every medical and public health student in the world! The strategy is simple, you find a contact person from Supercourse network and elsewhere and send to them a DVD, and have them copy the DVD for each student (at about $0.20). As an inducement, the Universities can put their logo along with the BA and the Supercourse logo on the DVD. If your university is interested in making at least 50 copies, or better yet; cover their entire school, please send to super1@pitt.edu.
A small batch was sent out, and the response has been excellent. The first note was from Johns Hopkins who will distribute it to all their students, Harvard, and Stanford have agreed as well. So, if we can say that Harvard and Johns Hopkins are distributing the DVD, then everyone will. Several centers are seeing if they can distribute this to all the students in their countries.
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Fayrouz.Ashour@bibalex.org.
Please pass this on to your friends!
Thanks,
Diabetes Supercourse Team
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