Global Health Institute

Georgetown University’s Mini Medical School Program is a community-centric lecture series that strives to create avenues of communication between the medical professionals of the Georgetown University Medical Center with the wider Georgetown and Washington, D.C., community. The biannual eight-week program features a series of two-hour lectures on different areas of medicine and health given by Georgetown University faculty leaders in their respective fields. Both informative and engaging, the lectures facilitate open dialogue with participants, fueling subsequent discussions across local middle schools, high schools, and professional organizations.

From July 2005 to December 2007, Indonesia reported the highest number of influenza A (H5N1) human cases in the world: 116 cases, with an extremely high fatality rate of 81 percent. According to E.R. Sedyaningsih, author of "Towards Mutual Trust, Transparency and Equity in Virus Sharing Mechanism: The Avian Influenza Case of Indonesia," due to limited laboratory diagnostic capacities, all suspected human H5N1 cases were referred to one of the 100 designated Avian Influenza Referral Hospitals. Samples were collected from suspected patients and then sent to a reference laboratory in Jakarta for diagnostic testing and confirmation. Indonesian specialists also sent their clinical specimens to several international laboratories affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN), but in January 2007, the government of Indonesia stopped sharing samples upon discovery that some of them had been provided to laboratories outside of the GISN without Indonesia’s consent.