Globalisation of prevention education: a golden lecture. Lancet

Abstract

Sir—John S Yudkin and colleagues (Sept 6, p 822),1 argue that teaching of international health to medical students in the UK will help to provide a greater understanding of the global trends of disease. Here, we describe how we gave a single lecture on disease prevention to more than 75% of the countries of the world. Improvements in hygiene and in our knowledge of how to prevent disease have led to a worldwide gain in life expectancy of 30 years over the 20th century. The way in which preventive medicine is taught has, however, hardly changed. The importance of disease prevention was recognised as early as the 5th Century AD by Hippocrates of Cos. Hippocrates taught that a proper diet is a necessity of health, and that For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet. THE LANCET • Vol 362 • November 8, 2003 • www.thelancet.com 1587 CORRESPONDENCE climate has a profound effect on both mind and body. In Greece, Sept 19 is celebrated as Hippocrates day, and in May, 2003, those involved in the Supercourse Prevention project (http://www.pitt.edu/~super1), funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), suggested that the day be used to spread worldwide the message of disease prevention. As such, on Sept 19, we posted the “Golden Lecture of Prevention” on the internet. The supercourse is an internet library of lectures on prevention, shared for free by 10 000 members from 151 countries in the Global Health Network. The golden lecture was designed to teach preventive approaches to health. Leading researchers from more than 30 countries, including Russia, Nepal, Cuba, Armenia, and several Islamic states, participated in the creation of the lecture, which is especially important for the developing world, where doctors and researchers are struggling to find costeffective ways to improve their population’s health. We distributed the golden lecture to doctors, professors, public-health professionals, and instructors by Sept 1, 2003, to be read and taught until and on Hippocrates day. To improve access to the lecture, we made two formats available. Over the next several months, the lecture was translated into 12 languages, including Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Indonesian, and Croatian. All of these materials were uploaded to the Supercourse website at http:// www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture/lec1051 1/index.htm. Overall, the lecture was used in 136 of the 189 UN-recognised countries.