Society and Disease Management

Catalog description

Society and Disease Management is an interdisciplinary general education course to educate students in the biological mechanisms of diseases, treatment of individual patients, and how disease burden is managed within communities. In addition to studying how infectious diseases spread through populations, societal impacts and global health approaches to managing disease interventions will be examined. Foundations of this course include the basics of the human immune system, development of vaccines and antibiotics, emergence of drug resistant diseases, as well as applications from economics, systems theory, and health policy. Specific diseases will be examined within a historical context leading to a survey of present day concerns relating to treatments, and then explore issues regarding future methods to control or eradicate disease. This longitudinal approach will provide students with a full awareness of disease management from its beginnings, to both early and modern treatment methods, culminating in how to potentially combat a disease using advances in genomic medicine and biotechnology all within the cultural framework of a community.