Welcome Address

I welcome you to join the Sixth Global Forum on Humanitarian Medicine in Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, to be held in Chennai from October 20th to 23rd, 2010 together with the 20th World Congress of Cardio-thoracic Surgeons.

The 6th Global Forum is specifically being organized with the aim to address key issues facing numerous developing countries in Asia, including the shortage of financial, material and human resources, which often aggravated by adverse economic conditions and loss of trained personal towards richer countries. In some Asian countries, problems due to shortage of technology and lack of education are no longer valid because of huge progresses made in these sectors.

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading non-communicable diseases in industrialized countries and a rapidly growing disease in the developing countries, especially in Asia. The non optimal health care facilities in the surgical treatment of congenital heart malformations are still a big concern in the majority of Asian countries despite the consistent efforts made to consolidate and coordinate actions in the most cost-effective and best sustainable way. With these forums, we would like to implement these actions for searching country-specific solutions and rallying a large number of NGOs for precise policies on research, prevention, and health care reinforcement, by including international organizations and foundations. Moreover, we would like to permit some Asian countries like Japan, India etc, to exercise leadership in their own regions by accentuating regional networking with “South-South” collaboration. Since economic progress in some countries in Asia has overcome demographic explosion over the last decade, in a near future, we can expect that more and more countries will achieve their medical goals on target thanks to this regional cooperation and transfer of knowledge.

I am delighted to invite you to join the 6th Global Forum on Humanitarian Medicine. Your active participation and sensitive unending support in these forums will allow for this traditional humanitarian platform to serve as the bridge from thought provoking discussions to concrete actions on site.

Professor Afksendiyos KALANGOS
President,
Global Humanitarian Forum on Humanitarian Medicine
in Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery