World Digestive Health Day, Heartburn

WORLD DIGESTIVE HEALTH DAY 2015 WDHD 2015—Heartburn: A Global Perspective Each year on May 29 the World Gastroenterology Organisation (WGO) celebrates World Digestive Health Day (WDHD) to raise awareness about a particular digestive or liver disease. The 2015 WDHD theme is “Heartburn: A Global Perspective.” Led by Chairman, Professor David Armstrong (Canada), the WGO Foundation Chair and Vice Chair, Eamonn Quigley (USA) and Richard Hunt (UK), respectively, and the 2015 Steering Committee, Mary Afihene (Ghana), Serhat Bor (Turkey), Henry Cohen (Uruguay), Colin Howden (USA), Peter Katelaris (Australia), Varocha Mahachai (Thailand), Govind Makharia (India), Joaquim Prado P de Moraes-Filho (Brazil), Ala Sharara (Lebanon), Vincenzo Stanghellini (Italy), and Frank Zerbib (France), the WGO wishes to raise awareness of heartburn and to provide a broad overview on this common symptom by providing gastroenterologists and, hence their patients and the lay public, with an understanding of the latest basic and clinical research in the pathogenesis, investigation, and treatment of esophageal symptoms. “Heartburn: A Global Perspective,” seeks to translate research into clinical practice and facilitate communication between health care providers, health care payers, and heartburn sufferers to ensure that patients receive appropriate dietary and lifestyle advice as well as appropriate investigations and treatment, relevant to their condition and circumstances. World Digestive Health Day 2015 will bring together people from around the world, in collaboration with over 100 of WGO Member Societies and regional affiliates through the development of educational and training materials, including a publication of the WGO Cascades Guidelines on the Management of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. Have you started planning your event? Although the official date of WDHD is May 29, many events take place throughout 2015. Past events include public campaigns, courses, and lectures on treatments of the current theme, marathons, walkathons, national meetings, press conferences, television and radio interviews, creating a country’s own WDHD Day, publications, and much more. For questions regarding WDHD or to officially submit your event for placement on the calendar, please email at: [email protected]. You may find a variety of tools and resources which benefit your physicians, other health care professionals, patients, and the general public, by visiting http://www.wgofoundation.org/wdhd-2015.html. Please also visit the WDHD 2015 Web site to request a copy of the 2015 WDHD logo for your use in promoting this year’s WDHD campaign. Watch for the WGO monthly e-Alert which will provide the latest news and updates, as well as issues of the quarterly e-WGN (http://www.worldgastroenterology.org/wgn.html), which features summaries of events that are taking place throughout 2015. We look forward to a productive and successful campaign in providing a global perspective on the management of heartburn! Figure FigureGASTRO 2015—TAKING WORLD CONGRESSES TO A NEW LEVEL Brisbane, Australia from Monday, 28 September to Friday, 2 October. Developed to update you on global gastroenterology, hepatology, endoscopy, inflammatory bowel disease, and much more, Gastro 2015 promises to be a World Congress with a difference! Gastro 2015 introduces the new paradigm for World Congresses, which will now take place every 2 years ensuring that the WGO provides its members with more regular updates. Gastro 2015 is also the first in the WGO plan to link world meetings with member societies, drawing on the strengths of each to create a program that is greater than the sum of its parts! The Gastroenterological Society of Australia (GESA) has enthusiastically embraced this idea to help create Gastro 2015. GESA brings its experience of hosting successful Australian, regional and international conferences to Gastro 2015 while WGO brings its wealth of international expertise and geographically special topics to make this Congress a unique experience. FigureThe comprehensive program has many innovative aspects. Eight streams covering inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), liver disease, endoscopy, and topics of special regional interest will run through most of each day. There will also be sessions dedicated to WGO interest groups, guidelines, celiac disease, neurogastroenterology, pediatrics, endoscopy, hepatology, and basic science. A selection of submitted free papers will have oral presentations. Most of the remainder will be presented as posters which offer wide exposure and opportunity for discussion. Here is some of what the daily program has to offer: Monday, September 28: The Postgraduate Course day where you can follow your own or a different stream of interest throughout the day; alternatively, mix and match the sessions. Included will be a stream dedicated to topics central to the WGO mission of global training and education especially in developing and low-resource countries. Tuesday, September 29: The two Presidents will preside over unopposed sessions offering the best of current gastroenterology and our young investigators to the widest audience on our first mainstream day. There will also be the traditional Australian plenary Bushell Lecture by Michael Manns and the WGO Distinguished Lecture by Australia’s Nobel Laureate, Barry Marshall—the only laureate in gastroenterology. Wednesday, September 30 to Friday, October 2: There will be special sessions presenting the spectacular advances in management of viral hepatitis. The challenges of funding the delivery of antiviral drugs to the global community will be a highlight and will draw on experts from the WHO and around the world including epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists, global health professionals, regulatory personnel, pharma executives, and other representatives from across the WGO membership. Evolution of therapies for IBD, drawing on an understanding of genetics, immunopathogenesis, and the role of the microbiome, will be a must for delegates as new waves of biologicals challenge us to position them in clinical care. Endoscopy will have a distinctly educational flavor with several of the world’s experts presenting preprepared video demonstrations of “how I do it” so as to drill quickly down into valuable tips and practices in endoscopy. There will be sessions addressing practices in training as delivered by the network of WGO Training Centers, including Australia’s own links with Fiji and now Myanmar. Screening for colorectal cancer is an evolving science with data continuing to emerge supporting different future approaches—stool-based DNA testing, blood-based testing, or endoscopic. The revolution in genetics will be integrated into the clinical program. Will we see disruptive technologies emerge and be presented at Gastro 2015? It will be important for us all to make those calls. Gastro 2015 also brings related groups to the meeting: the Australian Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (AusPEN); the Australian Pancreatic Club; the Gastroenterology Nurses College of Australia (GENCA); and their international counterpart, the Society of International Gastroenterological Nurses and Endoscopy Associates (SIGNEA). The meeting has been crafted to present excellence at every turn and reset the standard for future World Congresses. More than 30 international and 50 Australian and New Zealand speakers will update you on progress across our discipline as well in your own niche areas of interest. All of this will happen in the beautiful subtropical environment of Brisbane, which provides easy access for attendees to many of Australia’s world class and world heritage sites such as the Great Barrier Reef. If there is one gastroenterology congress that you wish to attend this year, make it Gastro 2015!

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.