So far I have been enjoying the style of this course, even though it’s really different from any course I’ve taken before. This is the first online class I’ve taken so I’m not really accustomed to not actually sitting in a lecture. I find it helps to have a professor or some other visual aid that I can focus on during the lecture, so the audio only lectures threw me off a bit at first.

This week we went over the WHO statistics for Sierra Leone and the United States. We compared a bunch of different statistics in the lecture between the two countries. It was eye opening to see how different stuff like life expectancy can be between the two countries. It was particularly shocking to see the pictures of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and the healthcare facilities for the outbreak. I also had no idea that the healthcare workers became shunned by the society for working with Ebola patients.

For our homework, I decided to compare and contrast the deaths caused by group statistic. It was interesting to see how most of the deaths in the US were due to non-communicable diseases, while most of the deaths in Sierra Leone were caused by communicable diseases. This makes sense considering the wide difference in healthcare between the two countries. I also looked into why the cardiovascular and diabetes category was so high for the United States, and I was surprised to find out that about 2/3 of the adult population is overweight in America. I knew we had a problem with our unhealthy diets, but I didn’t realize the problem was that bad here.