Subject: Infections - reaching out to parents and community

Posted by John F. Heinbokel on 10/15/2009
In Reply To:Infections Posted by Tim Joy on 10/14/2009

Message:

Several years ago, when Jeff Potash and I were associated with the VT Commons School, there was a flu season in which the United States anticipated a shortage of flu vaccine. That raised some concerns in the school and the community (albeit nothing like what we’ve seen for H1N1, more recently). We were able to convene an evening program for interested students and parents in which we played the handshake game, built a simple contagion model, and then extended it to include recovery and the process of vaccination as a second flow from susceptible to immune. That then served as a template to explore with the students and their parents the non-vaccine options that were still available and to build a sense that we weren’t necessarily helpless with the shortage of vaccine. Indeed, prior to vaccines the public health community did indeed deal effectively with contagious diseases focusing largely on limiting number of contacts.

Anyway, the take-home message here is that current events-ish topics like flu can provide good opportunities for extending the use of SD beyond the students in the classroom and offer an opportunity to reach out to and demonstrate SD’s power to parents and community members. We did a similar evening activity for a class that was studying commercial fishing – running a variant of FISHBANKS as an activity for the students and their parents.

john