This course is all about infectious diseases. We’ve selected four disease areas — HIV, Malaria, Emerging Infectious Diseases (Ebola and Zika), and TB — and we will go through each in turn. We’ve selected these diseases because they span a range of different types of disease and allow us to look at important issues that relevance of other diseases too. We will look at each disease in the same way: we begin by looking at the aetiology and epidemiology of the diseases. We then show how data on this disease can be used to understand important trends and patterns. We then focus on the interventions that can be used to address that disease - typically spanning both prevention and treatment - and consider how policies have been developed to address the disease. We finish by reflecting on the whole topic area of the disease with an external expert.

Welcome to this course on the aetiology, epidemiology and interventions for non-communicable diseases of the Global Diseases Masterclass. We’ve selected four disease areas and will go through each in turn. The diseases we’ve chosen are: Colorectal Cancer, Cardiovascular Disease (CVD), Dementia, and Diabetes. We have selected these non-communicable diseases because they span a range of different types of disease process and because of the expertise and experience that our School of Public Health has in these areas. This will provide an introduction to a few of the of most important global non-communicable disease challenges while also providing variation in aetiology, epidemiology and interventions to learn from. We hope that by the end of this course you will be able to describe the basics of the disease aetiology, global epidemic trends and the available interventions. We also hope you’ll be able to use this information to critique public health approaches and policy positions for the four non-communicable diseases we’ve covered as well helping you extend to further disease areas.