I participated in Imperial College London’s school outreach programme by doing an intro to infectious disease epidemiology with a group of year 10-12 students (age 15-18) (you can download my slides here). It was hugely rewarding and highly recommended for anybody considering supporting this sort of work. The group were sharp, good fun, and asked good questions – and perhaps included one of the next generation of infectious disease epidemiologists?

I started where all good sessions on ID epi should start: in a desperate attempt to get down wid the kids, with Jon Snow. Once we had moved on from Game of Thrones, we talked about the other, older John Snow and the Broad Street Pump (just down the road in Soho). I couldn’t find a simple classification of infectious diseases, so I made a very non-technical version grouped neither by organism, nor by clinical manifestion – but grouped by the buckets that I thought would make most sense to young adults (shared here in case it’s helpful for others too):

It took quite some time for me to decide what to cover with such a broad topic (thanks to those of you who answered my call for help Twitter), but managed to get it down to:

• Vaccines (and yes, got the usual anti-vax crap on Twitter).
• Antibiotics & HCAI (it was helpful that the session was in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building)!
• Crapsules (always good for dinner party chat and a cheap laugh).
• Applied research (why we need it and why it’s fun).
• Disease Detectives (I ran though this Zombie Preparedness exercise with the group, which was excellent).
• Why ID / epi needs you (a bit about career paths and my own journey).

Finally, again with the help of Tweeps, I collated some resources that I’ve shared below: