Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of Toronto/HMB436H Medical and Veterinary Mycology (2015 Fall)/Course description
- Course overview
This lecture-based course will familiarize students with fungi of public health importance, particularly those that cause disease in humans and other animals. The course will focus on the clinical presentation, pathophysiology, and treatment of fungal infections, as well as the ecology, physiology and evolutionary biology of the agents responsible. The course will also address other ways in which fungi influence human and animal health. Click here to go to the course website.
- Why medical mycology?
Mycology is that branch of biology that deals with the study of fungi. Medical mycology, in turn, is the study of fungi that cause disease. Generally speaking, there are relatively few fungi that are capable of causing human disease. By contrast, there are many bacteria and viruses able to infect people or cause them to become ill through other mechanisms. Even though their numbers are few, the fungal agents of human illness are uniquely problematic. This is partly due to the fact that fungi are more closely related to animals than other common disease-causing microbes. This closer relationship means that the drugs intended to disrupt fungal metabolic processes often have pronounced toxicity to humans. Fungal diseases are also interesting because their importance has grown with medical advancements. For example, fungal diseases tend to show up increasingly as complications of other diseases that compromise the immune system, like HIV/AIDS and diabetes, or as a result of treatments that cause immunosuppression, such as those used to treat cancer or to prevent rejection following organ transplantation. Fungi are the seventh most important agents of infection-related death in the United States resulting in nearly double the number of deaths as tuberculosis (see PMID 11486286). If all this sounds interesting, then this course is for you.
- The assignment
When I have taught this course in the past, I have included a written assignment where students each prepare a fully-referenced "biography" of a particular fungus, something along the lines of the popular blog, Fungus-of-the-Month, developed by my friend and colleague Professor Tom Volk at University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. These short articles are fun to read and fun to write, and I was always impressed with what my students produced, but I felt that more could be done with it. Here's where Wikipedia comes in. Although there are a whole bunch of very good Wikipedia articles on fungi (e.g., User:Sasata/Reviewed_content lists some of the best), there are really a lot of fungi! And many of the better-known, really important species are not represented. This is our chance to change that. For this year's class assignment, I'm going to have each student prepare a Wikipedia article on a different species of fungus that is important in human or animal health. Remember that many biomedically important fungi are also important for other reasons (e.g., some may be plant pathogens, some may be used for industrial applications, and some just might have interesting stories associated with them). Your assignment is not limited to discussing solely the biomedical aspects of your fungus - I expect your assignment to be comprehensive!
This assignment will be fun but it won't be easy. Because Wikipedia is a real online encyclopedia, there are a number of rules you will need to learn and follow, particularly about how to write the article, the tone you must use, the critical importance of backing up each fact you present with an appropriate citation, and a number of other issues that you will learn as you work through the assignment and we discuss your work in class. The assignment overall is worth 30% of your grade, and it is broken-up into 5 parts. The first 4 parts each count for 5%, and these are the assignments described below in Weeks 1, 2, 4 and 7. These are due by midnight EDT on September 18, 25, October 16, and October 30, 2015, respectively. The actual text of your article is due on November 13, 2015 and will count for 15% of your grade. It is important that you keep to these deadlines, and I will be checking your progress online. Late assignments will not be considered. For those of you needing assistance with this project you progress, I will hold an office hour each week following class. We will also discuss in class some of the other resources that are available to you. This is a serious and difficult exercise, but it is also intended to be fun and to give back to the community. Hopefully it will inspire you to continue contributing to Wikipedia and help you learn about medical mycology at the same time!