During the first two weeks of the term, we will focus on building a foundation for the balance of the term. Specifically, we will spend some time reading up on and discussing what we get from taking a historical perspective on infectious diseases. We will also work to get on the same page about some key ideas about infectious disease transmission that we will return to many times over the course of the semester.
In this module, we will revisit one of the foundational stories of epidemiology as a field and infectious disease epidemiology in particular: The 1854 Cholera outbreak in London's Golden Square. We will dig into the life and ideas of the famous and pioneering epidemiologist John Snow with an eye towards situating him and his collaborators and antagonists in their appropriate social context. We will also try to understand the extent to which the debates and social conflicts that arose around this and other Cholera outbreaks of the time reflect present-day challenges - or not.
In this module, we will expand our focus to include not just the interplay between the physical environment and infectious disease transmission to include the social structures that shape inequality in infection and death. We will do this through a case-study of the role played by racial residential segregation in generating and sustaining large disparities in Tuberculosis mortality between Black and White residents of Baltimore during the first half of the 20th Century. We will also dig into the social scientific literature on the fundamental role played by structural discrimination in generating health disparities across the board and try to figure out if this historical example aligns with the predictions of these models.
We will spend most of November working through a detailed history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic from its earliest days to the present. The purpose of this module is to focus on another way that social organization impacts the trajectory of infectious disease: Through activism that attempts to expand the window of which people and which conditions are deserving of care and dignity. This is decidedly a story about progress as a complex and fraught enterprise that doesn't always move forward or in predictable ways.
For the final weeks of the term, we will focus in specifically on landing the plane 🛬. We will work on tying up loose ends of both an intellectual and logistical nature: Specifically, we will take some time in class to get feedback from peers on your project work that you can incorporate into your work in advance of the project deadline. We will also spend a few class sessions bringing the historical lessons from both previous modules and your project work up to the present moment and discuss in what ways they can serve as a guide for navigating the outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics yet to come.
For the final weeks of class, we will turn our focus to finishing up final projects and also updating the class on your progress via presentations of your near-final projects.