Topics covered in this course will include emerging diseases and leading killers in the twenty-first century, disease ecology, disease history and mortality transitions, the sociology of epidemics, the role of epidemiology in the mobilization of public health resources to confront epidemics, and the social processes by which the groups become stigmatized during disease outbreaks.  This is a course that seeks to present a holistic view of global health by drawing on work crossing several disciplines, including anthropological demography, epidemiology, history of public health, disease history.   This is not a course in medical anthropology narrowly conceived.  The focus is primarily on acute outbreaks of communicable disease and the societal response.