Read the latest letter from ISUOG President, Prof. Tom Bourne, about the ISUOG World Congress program, upcoming education courses, plus the next webinar in the free ISUOG series.
This month a lot of work has been going into planning the ISUOG Virtual World Congress. The program has been finalised and the scientific committee has allocated the successful abstracts out of the 1003 that were submitted in total. We have new session topics and speakers in the program and some great plenaries, so look out for the program when it is published on the website in the near future. Once again, I hope the low registration fees for colleagues in low-income countries will make the meeting more accessible this year. Don’t forget there is just one month to go for our Earlybird registration on 16 August 2021.
Last week ISUOG held an “online twitter event” in collaboration with the Chinese University in Hong Kong, and expert panel answered questions from the public on issues related to COVID vaccination in pregnancy, I am sure the expert panel of Beate Kampmann, Liona Poon and Christoph Lees cleared up some of the uncertainties in this area.
The free ISUOG webinar series will continue over the next few months. The July webinar on Sunday 25th is led by Thierry Van Den Bosch and deals with endometrial and myometrial pathology and will cover topics ranging from adenomyosis, sarcoma, enhanced myometrial vascularity and endometrial cancer. In August, we will be back to Obstetrics, with Kypros Nicolaides and Liona Poon leading on predicting and preventing complications in pregnancy. On 21st August we also have the fetal neurosonography education course run by Dario Paladini “the dark side of the brain and changing the paradigm”. There is also a Basic Training course running over this coming weekend on the 17th and 18th July if you register quickly!
I wanted to highlight that Committee and Task Force member rotations occur regularly once a year at the time of the World Congress, there will be a number of member positions available again this year. If you want to be a part of the decision making at ISUOG, then keep a look out on the website as the application process, including essential criteria and instructions about how to apply will be published in mid-July. This is really important for the society, as it is vital that we have people with new ideas and the energy to make them happen playing an integral part in the organisation.
In the white journal this month there is a study on the risk of fetal loss after chorionic villus sampling in twin pregnancy, a study on the prenatal sonographic manifestation of esophageal atresia with or without tracheoesophageal fistula, a study on the effect of elective induction of labor at 39 weeks on children’s educational outcomes, as well as a Consensus Statement from ESGO/ISUOG/IOTA/ESGE on the preoperative diagnosis of ovarian tumors.
Before I close, I guess I need to get this out of the way and painful though it is to write this, I have to congratulate all our Italian colleagues on winning the European football championships. Watching England in a penalty shootout is always stressful, and this one proved no exception. If we are talking football, for any neutral, it was also good to see Lionel Messi finally win a trophy with the Argentinian national team. COVID continues to dominate the agenda elsewhere, with the UK now trying an uncontrolled experiment to see what happens when you allow the virus to spread with no restrictions in a relatively highly vaccinated population. What could go wrong?
I think that’s it from me for this month. I hope those of you planning holidays in the Northern hemisphere have are able to have a great time after what has been a difficult year for many. I suspect my newsletter in August will be very short for exactly that reason!
Best wishes
Tom