The Opening Lecture at ECR always draws immense attention. On March 4th, it was the “First Lady of Radiology” as Congress President M. Szczerbo-Trojanowska called her, Professor Dr Anne G. Osborn, University of Utah, USA, who opened the event. The internationally renowned doctor of diagnostic neuroradiology spoke about “The two faces of HIV/AIDS in the brain” – a matter close to her…
One of the main topics at Health Forum Gastein 2009 was the way in which various healthcare systems struggle to cope with communicable diseases and their prevention. During the event, Dr Hans Kluge, Head of the Country Policies and Systems Unit, at the WHO regional office for Europe, spoke with Meike Lerner about omnipresent factors that work against effective TB and HIV/AIDS prevention…
Within the World Health Organisation European region three quarters of all new tuberculosis (TB) infections occur in Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, Uzbekistan, the Ukraine and Turkey. The multi-resistant TB viruses, which can no longer be treated with conventional medication, are particularly common there.
Basic diagnostic x-ray services are a key component of primary health care delivery. However, two-thirds of the world's population is without access to it, according to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates. The WHO further estimates that there is a need for one diagnostic imaging machine for every 50,000 people. The World Health Imaging Alliance announced that it has cemented key…
Czech hospitals are seeking powerful inspiration regarding antibiotics (ATB) consumption from France, where a recent public campaign helped to decrease ATB consumption by 30%.
The “Project Connect”, a program designed to build Public Private Partnerships to combat HIV and tuberculosis in India recently recorded a huge success:
For the second time the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, Sweden, invites to the European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE). The ECDC published now a forecast about expectations and the global hot topics of the international event in Berlin, November 19-21.
Pharma company Eli Lilly has increased an existing partnership with the World Medical Association (WMA) by granting c. 646,505 euros to expand online training courses for physicians on multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), which they have been developed over the past year.
In 2005, former German Chancellor Schröder and Russian President Putin agreed on a strategic partnership to give infectious disease control the highest priority.
By putting the World TB Day slogan 'I am stopping TB' into action, 11 nurses have earned the 2008 ICN/Lilly Award, for their outstanding work in fighting tuberculosis (TB) and multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB)[1]. The award recipients come from six TB affected countries: from Kenya (Diana Jelegat Kipsoisoi), Lesotho (Likhapha Ntlamelle ), Malawi (Chrisie Bwazi, Rodwell Gundo and Shouts Simeza),…
The WHO-Euro region ranges from Portugal to the East Asian parts of Russia, including Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. Because of the increasing numbers of tuberculosis and rates of multidrug resistance (MDR TB), tuberculosis was declared a regional emergency in 2004.
A third of the worlds population is infected with the bacterium Myobacterium tuberculosis which infects around nine million people annually.
The 2008 ECR promises to be international, controversial, inspiring, as well as a meeting in which new insights for inter-professional relationships and working practices are sought. The programme is impressive indeed.
TB bacterium have a unique chemical coating and it is hoped that a tiny gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GC-MS) - a detection device* developed for the Beagle 2, on its mission to Mars - will be able to pick this out from space, in a project run by Britain's Open University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Today little is known about the metabolism of the tuberculosis bacillus and, because of its slow growth, experiments for new drugs take a long time. Now a team of researchers form the University of Surrey built an in silico model of the agent that causes TB - a virtual TB bacillus - that promises to speed up the drug discovery process.
`Respiratory diseases are still a huge burden for our countries,´ Giovanni Viegi, President of the European Respiratory Society pointed out at the congress.
TB causes three million deaths annually, ranking it higher than any other infectious disease. And TB has resurged in Europe. In August, the British Thoracic Society, British Lung Foundation and TB Alert highlighted its increase in over the last 15 years in the UK alone.