While the U.S. Government continues its second week of its shutdown and its series of unintended consequences, a worldwide group of researchers continued efforts to meet. “Despite the shutdown, we are working to develop ways to better conduct very real research that has a very real effect of saving lives and limbs”, noted Professor Andrew JM Boulton, President of the European Association of the Study of Diabetes and de-facto chair of the meeting. “When the NIH closed, we stayed open.” The meeting, originally designed to take place at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) instead took place in a small hotel conference room convened by the participants. David G. Armstrong, Professor of Surgery and Director of the University of Arizona’s Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance went on to add “This work is too important not to happen. In some ways, this do-it-yourself efforts brings some of us closer together– because we know what is at stake.” Every 20 seconds, a limb is lost due to diabetes, worldwide and every 8 seconds someone develops a diabetes-related wound in the USA, alone. The clinical researchers met today to devise ways to work together along with NIH to help stem this tide.
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| From Left: Dane Wukich (UPMC), Christopher Attinger (Georgetown), William Jeffcoate (Nottingham/NICE), Michael Edmonds (King’s College), Joseph Mills (University of Arizona’s SALSA), Lawrence A. Lavery (UT Southwestern), David G. Armstrong (University of Arizona’s SALSA), Andrew JM Boulton (Manchester), Loretta Vileikyte (Manchester), Paul J. Kim (Georgetown). Not pictured: Geoff Gurtner (Stanford) |
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