Course blog: assignment #1

Hi, my name is Rosa Kim. I am a freshman at Johns Hopkins University. I am from Belmont, Massachusetts which is a little town in Boston suburb. I am a big baseball fan(Red Sox, obviously). I first came here with neuroscience major, but i am now considering switching out of neuroscience. I took neuroscience course back in high school, and I thought it was pretty interesting but I wanted to learn more applicable and more community involved. Meanwhile, i took this freshman seminar course called "From Tropical Disease to Global Health" last semester and was very inspired by how public health is so much involved with politics and the public. I still remember when I read the book "Hot Zone" by Richard Preston for required class reading; in the book, CDC and USAMRID didn't publicize the out break of marburg virus at this research lab in Atlanta, fearing the public's panic. It was so much more complicated than simply curing individual sick patients. This is a reason that i decided to take intro to public health this semester; so that i can learn more about public health in detail. From the past 3 lectures, not one from today, we learned what "public health" is, what is its goal, and three core function of "public health." Public health is defined as the science of preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability, and of prolonged healthy life of the public. In other words, different from medical care which heavily focused on healing individual patients, public health emphasizes impovement of the health of that population and preventing illness. My interest in public health may be epidemiology, so more like the science area, rather than policies and statistics. However, I'll see how it goes as i learn more and more about public health this semester! I watched the movie "Outbreak " in Tropical disease class last semester and thought it would be very intersting to find a source of infectious disease. My initial impression of the first two classes was pretty good. I honestly learned alot from those lectures; I was able to grasp what public health is and how it is different from medical care, which is a reason why i decided to stick to this class =) However, some of the materials were repeating. I liked the fact that students can involve even though it's a lecture class.