Professor Hans Rosling. Picture by ted.com
When I first started out learning about global public health, the course that got me hooked was “An Introduction to Global Health”, taught by Professor Hans Rosling from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. After taking this course, I was inspired to further explore the field of public health and later biodefense.
Professor Hans Rosling, who sadly died of cancer in 2017, makes the course very interesting, entertaining, and fun. Professor Rosling has been a big advocate for the idea that the world is actually becoming a better place and that there have been numerous drastic improvements for humanity. He and his son Ola have often presented his philosophy on TED talks, written extensively on this idea, one that often gets overshadowed today by the vast amount of problems that the news presents to people. We are often oblivious to the fact that there have been incredible improvements in our society, which have made the world better. Professor Rosling and his son also founded Gapminder, an organization which is dedicated to teaching basic facts and providing statistics about the world that almost everyone gets wrong – it has such a good website, it actually deserves its own blog post, so I’ll post more about this soon!
Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Recognized as Sweden’s best university and one of the largest, most prestigious medical universities in the world. Picture by Shutterstock
“An Introduction to Global Health” is an online course available on EdX. It is a great source of information for anyone who is interested in or would like to know more about different aspects of medicine, global public health, and health policies. High school and college aged kids would enjoy this course because it is often funny and very interactive. In six weeks, the course covers a broad range of topics including:
- maternal and child health
- sexual reproductive health and rights
- major infectious diseases, such as malaria, TB, HIV, and pneumonia
- non-communicable diseases
- mental health
- responses to disasters
- injuries
- health systems and their financing, and
- health policies worldwide
You will explore the differences in health outcomes around the world, and the reasons for those. This course is available for free on the EdX platform. All you need to do to view it is to create an EdX account. Since the course is no longer live you can only audit it.
Overall, this is an entertaining course that can help you learn a lot of interesting facts about global health.
Click here to view this course: https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-global-health-kix-kiglobalhx
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