Awards Banquet

The Global Health Council's 2009 Awards Banquet was held last night. As an insider, it was amazing to see how everything has come together to create such a huge gathering of people from around the world. As I stood by the front doors I was shocked to look around at everything in the Regency ballroom - the decorations, the sheer numbers of chairs and tables, and the enormous stage - it all came crashing down upon me. A staff of 45 people organized an event so gigantic and so important. It was amazing!!

After ushering people in to their seats, helping them if they did not know where they were supposed to be seated, I was able to sit down for dinner and enjoy the awards banquet. I sat and discussed global health with others at my table, and listened in quiet awe of the award winners. The work they have done has made such tangible and enormous impact around the world and in their home countries. Dr. Douglas Gwatidzo spoke emotionally of those who he believed were more deserving of the award he received, (The Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights) and of those who made his work and that of others possible. He has worked tirelessly to help beleaguered colleagues in Zimbabwe's collapsed health sector; and has provided medical and legal documentation and care for victims of state torture in Zimbabwe. His defiance of Robert Mugabe's policies and actions is inspiring and amazing. I had tears in my eyes.

The Award for Best Practices in Global Health was presented to Dr. Harshad Sanghvi, whose work in Kenya, Indonesia, Nepal and Afghanistan focuses on providing post-partem hemorrhaging medicines to women and midwives in rural areas that have no access to doctors. In his speech, he discussed the role that we all play in helping the world to be a better place, saying, "We create change because the current situation regarding the very high mortality and morbidity in developing nations, combined with the inequity in access to health care between poor and rich people is just not acceptable in civilized nations." I don't think anyone could have said what we do, and what we aim to do, better than he did.

And finally, the Gates Award for Global Health was awarded to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the more than 100 years of education and awareness that they have provided to thousands of graduates in more than 140 countries around the world. Truly a global organization, The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was recognized for its dedication to combating tropical diseases and improving hygiene in the world, and for its off campus program in which students around the world can become educated without having to study in London. The one million dollar grant awarded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation will help to improve their ability to educate and create change around the world.

It was an amazing evening, and as an intern, it was frankly humbling and inspiring to see all these amazing individuals all around and to hear such stories of bravery and selflessness. Music was provided by the amazing band, Nation Beat, an outfit of musicians from the Southern United States and Brazil. It was fun music, great food, and inspiration all around as the evening came to an end!

- Geoff Calver

Tweeting At The Conference

Twitter is all the rage. A social networking site that allows users to post short messages of 140 characters or less on the web from the comfort of their computers or phones, it has grown exponentially this year, and is now a tool in use at our 2009 conference.

Conference attendees have been posting tweets (the vocabulary for a post on twitter), marked with the "hashtag" #GHC36 so that we can track comments related to the conference, and it has been a resounding success. Hundreds of tweets already, and hundreds more to come! The tweets comment on everything from landing at the airport and DC to being excited about the conference, to thoughts and commentary on all aspects of the conference.

And I was extremely excited today to set up twitter for use in our opening plenary session. The plenary, Tranformations: Discovering New Strategies Using Proven Technologies, focused on the use of mobile devices to transform the way that global health is implemented worldwide. I met with Cyrus Favriar, the moderator, who is a freelance journalist with frequent articles on NPR, the CBC, and more. We briefly discussed the idea of using twitter to ask questions at the plenary, and set it up so that a unique hashtag, #GHCp1, would be used to direct questions from mobile devices. Not only was it amazing to see it in use, but it was amazing to see the effect of mobile devices upon communication in this manner. While the panelists were discussing the use of mobile devices in global health, they were receiving questions on twitter via the same means.

It was a great opportunity for me to set up a new technology for use at our conference, and it was amazing to see it in action. Twitter is a new phenomenon, an internet creation that is a fine example of how technology can enhance and aid everything from large conferences to global health.

- Geoff Calver

Chronicling The Global Health Council's 2009 Conference on Flickr

Flickr is a powerful and amazing website dedicated to sharing photography with the world. Recently, we used Flickr as an outlet for photographer's to post their contributions to our 2009 Photo Contest. Receiving contributions from around the world, our photo contest pooled together wonderful photography that could be shared with people in every corner of the globe.

We are once again using Flickr to highlight photography from this year's Global Health Council Conference. While we have a professional photographer on site who will be chronicling the events of the conference, we would love to have contributions from attendees as well! So, if you have a camera and are snapping photos while at the conference, feel free to join our group and contribute!

The group can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/conference2009/

Instructions for posting and joining the group can be found on the group site. We are looking forward to seeing your photos and sharing our own as well!

- Geoff Calver

All a-Twitter

Dr. Gwatidzo, Jonathan Mann Award recipient, having just arrived from Zimbabwe.

The Omni Shoreham Hotel is abuzz with excitement as the the Global Health Council's 36th Annual Conference gets underway. With tote bags stuffed and registration packets at the ready, the Council's board and staff are looking forward to welcoming some 2,000 participants to this yearly event.

This year's conference, which highlights technology, also introduces a few new techological features to the conference. For example, the presenter abstracts are now available on CD. We are also integrating social media, which, in most cases, can be accessed through mobile devices. Find us on Facebook, post your photos to our Flickr pool, and keep tabs on Twitter. In fact, Twitter is already atwitter (pun intended) with plans for the #GHC36 (also known as conference) @GlobalHealthorg. IntraHealth's team, in particular, has been really active about preparations for their various events - all of which sound very exciting. Tomorrow, we launch the blogosphere on http://www.globalhealthconference.org/, which highlights our official conference bloggers.


Our day began at 5:30 this morning with an early morning cab ride to the airport with Dawn Carey, awards coordinator, to meet Dr. Douglas Gwatidzo, chairperson of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) and 2009 recipient of the Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights. Though he had just emerged from a 24-hour journey from Harare, Dr. Gwatidzo showed no sign of weariness and was eager to discuss Zimbabwe with us - the hospital with no running water, the state of the medical community, the positive signs that are slowly emerging, using soccer as a bridge between people... But wait until the awards banquet, where he is sure to wow us all with his speech. He is quite eloquent.

Dr. Gwatidzo discussing Zimbabwe in the cab.
If you don't have a banquet ticket yet, there are still tickets available at the registration desk. If you have a ticket already, make sure and stop by Will Call (where I'll be stationed for most of the day) to pick a seat. Today is, perhaps, the best day to pick-up your registration materials so you can spend the rest of the evening pouring through the final program and posting the sessions you think are interesting on Twitter.

NOTE: Over breakfast, we got word that Dr. Binayak Sen, the imprisoned 2008 Jonathan Mann Award winner, was granted bail by the Supreme Court of India.

- Tina Flores