Intended for healthcare professionals

Rapid response to:

Fillers Middle East perspectives

Call for papers

BMJ 2006; 332 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.332.7545.818 (Published 06 April 2006) Cite this as: BMJ 2006;332:818

Rapid Response:

Middle East health perspectives: Improved East-West East-West Scientific Collaboration through the Supercourse

Sir,

The Middle East is the most neglected health arena in the world, facing
many political turmoils, inequities, and other challenges. Despite their
expertise, scientists from Middle East have very few opportunities to
share their research data with their colleagues around the world. Very few
publications are coming out of Middle East, despite the fact that several
Middle Eastern countries made substantial progress in improving their
health indicators in the past few decades.

There is a critical need to improve access to latest biomedical literature
and to improve health information sharing in the Middle East. Cost-effective, user friendly, and open access Internet-based systems have a
great potential to improve the information transfer between the Middle
East and developed countries, assisting researchers in the Middle East to
overcome scientific isolation and brain drain.

We have begun to overcome the challenges of information sharing through
the construction of the Global Health Network Supercourse project.

Supercourse is a library of over 2500 public health lectures, shared by
over 31000 members of the global health network. Supercourse is housed
both at the University of Pittsburgh, USA www.pitt.edu/~super1 and in the
Library of Alexandria, Egypt www.bibalex.org/supercourse (1). The concept
of the Supercourse is simple: improving public health teaching around the
world through sharing of lectures. Supercourse lecturers include full
professors, IOM members, Nobel Prize Laureates, and many other
distinguished scientists. Over 40% of the Supercourse lectures were
donated from the developing countries. Disaster Just in Time (JIT)
Supercourse lectures have been a prime example of a global collaboration
with development by scientists from Iran, Russia, Pakistan and the USA.

The idea is to produce the best possible lectures for educators worldwide
just after disasters to help faculty and students to understand the
science of the disaster.

This is similar to the philosophy of the new Library of Alexandria. Based
in Egypt, reaching to both East and West, the library is dedicated to
spreading knowledge and building better understanding between peoples and
cultures. It was therefore natural for the Library to be partner with the
Supercourse initiative, as the Library has a mirrored server for the
lectures that embody the collective wisdom of the east and the west
scientists, and will make them freely available to all educators of the
world.

This successful approach would be easily adopted to build a Middle East
Network and Supercourse to reduce the knowledge divide between east and
west. We have started an Islamic Supercourse with over 1800 Middle
East/Islamic investigators (2). This could easily be expanded to build a
Middle East Supercourse of science, where we network every scientist in
the Middle East and worldwide. The Library of Alexandria could establish
a world class system of global lecture sharing through use of S 2 S
interchange (scientist to scientist ). Following the Ancient tradition,
the library of Alexandria could serve as a very unique liason between
scientists, bridging East and West.

We declare that we have no conflict of interest.

Reference List

(1) Laporte RE, Omenn GS, Serageldin I, Cerf VG, Linkov F. A
Scientific Supercourse Science. 2006 Apr 28;312(5773):526

(2) Husseini A, Saad R, LaPorte RE. Health supercourse to end Arab
isolation. Nature 2002;417:788.

Competing interests:
None declared

Competing interests: No competing interests

15 May 2006
Faina Y Linkov
Research Associate
Ali Ardalanan, Ismail Serageldinb, Faina Linkov, Ronald E LaPorte
Department of Epidemiology, University of Pittsburgh 3512 Fifth Ave, Room 312 Pittsburgh PA 15261