Post-COVID-19 Medical Collage training approaches

       One of the lessons we learned from the last Corona pandemic is that we urgently need to develop our methodology for teaching microbial diseases in the diagnosis, and therapeutic approaches, not just prevention.

  The first thing that comes to the doctor’s mind when he senses the presence of a microbial disease is the antibiotic or the anti-viral therapy since the disease is caused by either of them, knowing that microbial diseases are based on two factors, the first of which is the cause (the germ itself) and the second is the immune response to it.

There are many microbial diseases, and if the immunity is absent, there will be no harm to the body, and vice versa for other diseases.

There are also many germs and antibiotics that cause an exaugurated immune response, leading to allergic diseases.

The problem is that we define microbial diseases only through pathogenesis and we combine with the explanation of the subject the pathophysiology effect (i.e., the immune response) and this is wrong... because the immune response changes with the change of the germ in terms of its identification and volume .. and the best example to that  is an infected son with the Corona virus, that led to his death might show a different response to the mother whom nursed him day and night in the severity and outcome.

In a survey I conducted on my fellow doctors, I found that their knowledge of prevention is stronger than their knowledge of therapy, and this proves that the teaching, and training of  communicable diseases in the community medicine department is more informative than that in  in the field of pathology, microbiology, medicine, and pharmacology. Recently, many drugs that lower the immune system have been approved to control the immune response, and most of them are only used to treat human organ transplants.

After many deliberations with the college deen, Prof. Zakir Muhammad Mohsen and the President of the University, Prof. Mushtaq Talib Saleh, it was agreed on a national conference for the branches of microbiology to discuss  how to improve of the curriculum after the Corona pandemic and the lessons we learned from field work in the pandemic field isolation hospitals.

In the framework of coordination between the college branches and the Iraqi Committee for Medical Specialties, Prof. Dr. Haitham Noman Clinic from the Internal Medicine department forwarded  a proposal to open a study of communicable diseases on the Iraqi Committee for Medical Specializations, which was well received by many doctors in Iraq with direct support from the Deanship and the University Presidency.

The souls of the martyrs of the medical profession will not go without a realistic change in fulfillment of our pledge to them.

                                                                          A.M.D. Yasser Mufid Abdulateef

                                                                     Head of the Medical Microbiology Branch