Closmg Remarks by Dr. Yo Yuasa President
International Leprosy Congress
Dr. Zhang Wenkang, The Minister of Health
Dr. Cao Ronggui, The Vice Minister
Honorable Guests
Dear Colleagues
Ladies and Gentlemen
"This was certainly something different. This was no usual international conference with empty meeting halls and full reception room, a pot pour of speeches, reports and superficial discussion. This was a serious conference with clear theme and practical purpose, attended by participants anxious to go deeply into questions, and to set practical actions on the right road."
The above quotes are slightly paraphrased version of Dr. Jessner's introductory summary of the Proceedings of the first International Leprosy Congress in Berlin in 1897.
I am happy to say, that I can use almost exact words to describe what we have done over the last 6 days. It was indeed a serious, a very serious gathering, certainly on the part of the organizers, and according to my observations, on the part of many participants as well. We had a clear, unifying main theme, "Working toward a world without leprosy", with practical purposes of undertaking actions which will lead us to this goal. There was a remarkable degree of active participation as shown on the first day's open forum on the "Future of ILA", or at the Q/A session after Open Panel discussion in the morning of the Days 2, 3 and 4, or on plenary sessions of Day 5.
With that first congress in Berlin, modern fight against leprosy had started, which had made a noteworthy progress and brought us to where we stand now. With this 15th Congress in Beijing, we are starting the second century of our fight which should hopefully take us to our stated goal.
Obviously, to my great relief, radically altered structure of daily program has been accepted at least on this occasion, perhaps more actively than just passively, making this Congress more "integrated" and "participants friendly" than before.
"Forward looking" and "Action-oriented" nature of the Congress have also been apparently understood, accepted and mostly realized in general, thanks no doubt to the effort of the three moderators of Day 2 to 4, Prof. Smith, Dr. Walter and Dr. Krahenbuhl, and with active collaboration of the speakers on the "Current issues", members of the Panel, and chairpersons and members of the workshops. I am grateful to the participants who tolerated inconveniences due to schedule alterations.
Of course there were a number of criticisms, shortness of workshop was one heard most frequently, but it was a part of more general complaint on overcrowding of program in 6 days. If we had a luxury of 10 days or 2 weeks, we could have organized the program with more breathing space in between and less concurrent sessions. As I mentioned in the Program Guide, this Congress was an experiment, and we, the Organizing Committee, have learned much from this experiment in order to plan better for the future Congresses.
