Epidemics, Pandemics and Outbreaks

Welcome to Week One! This week’s lesson immerses you in the world of epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks and our efforts to prevent and respond to them. It will prepare you to engage in depth with the lessons that are coming up in weeks 2-4: "Understanding Infectious Diseases," "Global Health Security," and "Local Countermeasures."

Welcome to Week Two! This week’s lesson provides you with the tools needed to understand the world of infectious disease. It will allow you to develop a context of knowledge and familiarity with the concepts that inform legal and public health response strategies to outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics. What you learn here will be drawn upon in weeks 3-4: “Global Health Security” and “Local Countermeasures.”

Welcome to Week 3! Now that you are more familiar with the nature and history of infectious disease, consider the following quote from Natalie Angier, American nonfiction writer and a science journalist for The New York Times: “Today, diseases as common as the cold and as rare as Ebola are circling the globe with near telephonic speed, making long-distance connections and intercontinental infections almost as if by satellite. You needn't even bother to reach out and touch someone. If you live, if you're homeothermic biomass, you will be reached and touched. Microbes are, after all, members of the most ancient, zealous and Darwinically gilded 24-7 delivery consortium. They travel by land, sea, air, nose, blows, glove, love, sewage, steerage, rat backs, hat racks, uncooked burritos, overlooked mosquitoes. And, oh, how they love the global village.” Indeed, the same forces of globalization that have lowered barriers to global communication, travel, and commerce have amplified the ability for infectious diseases to spread internationally. In many ways, defense against this common threat is only as strong as each nation’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats, and the collective ability of the international community to coordinate these capacities multilaterally.

Welcome to Week Four! This week’s lesson introduces you to the legal interventions available to state and local public health practitioners to combat epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks. In addition to the law, we will look at some of the ethical and practical issues associated with disease reporting requirements, the effect of a declaration of an emergency, travel restrictions, quarantine and isolation.