It’s that time of the semester.
Saint Louis University students are choosing the courses they will study next semester. A new course, touching upon the incidents of the Sept. 11 acts of terrorism, will grace the schedules of many students.
EOHC 193: Catastrophic Terrorism and the Public’s Health is a three-credit-hour course that will be offered for the first time this Spring 2002 semester.
The course will be taught by Dr. Greg Evans and Bruce Clements, director and associate director, respectively, of Management and Training for the Center for the Study of Bioterrorism and Emerging Infections. The center is part of the SLU School of Public Health.
Both Evans and Clements have been visible in recent weeks in national electronic and print media, notably CNN, providing expert information in relation to Sept. 11 and subsequent events.
According to a campus-wide e-mail, “The course will review the growing threat of catastrophic terrorism and the potential immediate and long-term public health consequences.”
In addition, the course will examine the range of potential events, including conventional terrorism and the use of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
“The multi-disciplinary nature of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery activities associated with these events will be explored with a focus on how they relate to the public’s health,” according to the e-mail.
“In this day and age, people should be more aware of how terrorism and bioterrorism could affect their lives,” Evans said. “This really fits into what’s been going on since September 11.”
Clements said that the course was already in the works prior to Sept. 11, but moved higher on the list of priorities of the center.
“The course will especially benefit people early on who might not have chosen a major,” Evans said.
The response to terrorism involves many aspects of all careers, according to Clements. He said that it’s a good choice for people working toward careers in areas from law or law enforcement, to healthcare and mental health and especially microbiology and other basic sciences.
The long-term impacts could also have a big effect on psychology and sociology, Clements said. “Psychologists will have one of the biggest challenges to deal with if something were to occur.”
“Basically, anyone interested in taking the course will probably have some sort of justification for taking it, regardless of the major,” Clements said.
According to Clements, the course deals with response to an event and preparing for it. “It’s incumbent on us as society to pre-pare and have citizens ready to respond.”
“We were the ones who came up with the idea for the course,” Evans said.
“I’ve known for a while that I would be playing a role in this, whether it was teaching or advising, I didn’t know,” Clements said.
Since Sept 11, the center has been dealing with a lot of work and media coverage. Due to all of the work and publicity, the two instructors decided that that it would be better to split the instruction of the course rather than have one of them deal with it solely. “This is a first for the School of Public Health faculty to be teaching an undergraduate course,” Clements said.
Evans is looking forward to the class. “This is my first opportunity to teach undergrad, and I’ve been here for 30 years.”
Clements considered the course as a servi
ce to the students. He compared it to serving in the military. “You don’t ever want to go to war, but when you finally do, it’s what you’ve been preparing for,” he said. “I feel the same way about this course.”
