Copyright - WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION 

And here is the second part of yesterday’s conference update

For those of you with an avid interest in global health research… and those who conveniently already live in mainland China, the following conference may just ignite a spark of interest. Between the 29^th of October to the 2^nd of November, the Global forum will be hosting its annual meeting in Beijing, entitled ‘Equitable Access: Research challenges for health in developing countries’. During these five days, policy-makers, research institutions, NGOs and health ministries worldwide, will all come together to reflect on the key challenges faced by the poorest and most marginalised countries, including access to affordable medicines and social inequity.

As the title of the conference insinuates, the focus of the symposium will be on “research”. More specifically, speakers will debate over the importance of today’s research in enhancing our knowledge of global health problems, developing new technologies and working towards the implementation of equitable practices worldwide.

In preparation for the symposium, the Lancet will be publishing a series at the end of September which will describe the state of the world’s vital statistics. In this series, they will highlight the dearth of information available globally concerning statistics about health. Although each country has the facilities to provide detailed accounts of their economic status, few carry out sufficient and accurate research into their birth and death tolls. What this means is that millions of deaths are sadly being unaccounted for throughout the globe and causes of death are left unknown. The Lancet thus aims to promulgate the need for better health research by all countries if any significant headway is to be seen in tackling the issue of health inequity.

This conference (in which the Lancet will present its research) is particularly geared towards young researchers and their role in enhancing knowledge worldwide. If this is something that appeals to you or you just happen to be in Beijing at the time, visit http://www.globalforumhealth.org for a full description of the conference and registration fees.

Aditi Das and Jo Tuthill

Bookmark on delicious | Digg

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.