1st World Health Summit: Hopeful premiere

Science and medicine are advancing in previously unknown manner. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cell research and imaging procedures promise an undreamt-of potential for new forms of healing and prevention. But while the system of science is prospering, the question of its controllability and responsibility arises more and more urgently. The benefits, the risks and the financial viability of medical progress as an advantage for the individual must be compared with the assessment of the global social consequences: and this in world that is characterized by social imbalance, poverty, climate change and the financial crisis. This Herculean task can neither be mastered with old structures and ways of thinking, nor by going it alone at national level. Supranational approaches to solutions and obligations are imperative. At the G-8 summit in 2007 in Heiligendamm, the German government tried to prioritize global health, but without the desired success. Based on the World Economic Forum in Davos, the idea for separate World Health Summit arose. With the support of the German government and the French government, the Berlin Charit and the Universit Paris Descartes then started to build the M-8 alliance: group of eight leading medical-scientific centers from Germany, France, the USA, Great Britain, Russia and Japan , Australia and China in cooperation with 65 national academies. The central activity of the M8 will be an annual World Health Summit, which will premiere in Berlin from October 14th to 18th. 30 health and research ministers from four continents, Nobel Prize winners, representatives of the World Health Organization, research organizations and industry have confirmed their participation. But there are protests in advance. According to statement by 20 organizations that have planned protest and an alternative conference, this summit is not suitable for addressing global health problems, but rather threatens to contribute to the problems that it supposedly intends to solve. The focus of the World Health Summit is not healthy living conditions and good health care for everyone, but curative individual medicine and the use of high technology. med. Detlev Ganten cannot understand these allegations. The aim of the event is to show that modern high-performance medicine and thinking about the fair distribution of health goods should be brought together.We will not change the world with the summit, Ganten explained to the German rzteblatt, but we want to set an example that the medical profession is ready to take responsibility. For him, the event follows Virchow's dictum in an ideal way. Medicine is social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on large scale. The summit critics should also be able to follow this credo, says Ganten, and relies on common ground. He announced that he would attend the alternative congress and that representative of the critics should speak at the summit over the weekend. Dr. med. Vera Zylka-Menhorn Head of Medical Report