PITTSBURGH - A University of Pittsburgh lecture on the public health impact of disasters will be webcast later this month, and will likely be one of the largest academic lectures ever given.

"We're trying to teach worldwide over a million students," said Ronald LaPorte, professor of epidemiology and the event's organizer.

About 170 people may attend the actual lecture on Sept. 29, to be given by Eric Noji, chief of the Epidemiology, Surveillance and Emergency Response Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Dr. Noji is known for his ability to evaluate what works effectively and what does not work," said Bernard Goldstein, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health. His expertise is particularly timely in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Goldstein said.

The program will be webcast live and distributed free on other organizations' networks to more than 150 countries. The United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Canadian military and about 150 universities are expected to carry the webcast.

"Several countries want to distribute the lecture ... and that alone would be about 400,000 before we add everything else in," LaPorte said.

LaPorte said an audience of a million is feasible because the school's last such lecture, on tsunamis, drew 400,000 people worldwide.

"The advantage of looking at disasters is everybody is interested in them," he said. "There's always disasters around us. We see them on television and they scare us."