World Health Day, on 7 April, marks the founding of the World Health Organization and is an opportunity to draw worldwide attention to a subject of major importance to global health each year. In 2008, World Health Day focuses on the need to protect health from the adverse effects of climate change.

On this day, a Symposium took place in Melbourne and was co-organised by APACPH member, Monash University.  The Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine co-organised with the Burnet Institute the AMREP World Health Day Symposium as partners of AMREP (Alfred Medical Research and Education Precinct).  This symposium created the opportunity to bring together students, academics, health practitioners, researchers and policy makers interested in global health.  Over 200 participants were present and while most of them were from Melbourne, we also had a few from interstate and countries such as PNG, Malaysia, Fiji, New Zealand and South Africa.  There was also representation from various NGOs such as World Vision, Save the Children Australia and Oxfam as well as members of various government agencies such as AusAID.  It was a diverse group that provided insights from various perspectives on global health issues.

The keynote session was delivered by Prof David Karoly, a renowned climate scientist from the University of Melbourne on the theme for this year’s World Health Day, ‘Protecting Health from Climate Change’

In addition there were other presentations in the two main streams – Sexual and Reproductive Health & Addressing non-communicable diseases and healthy ageing which contributed to the overarching theme for the day, ‘Research supporting policy and practice in low- and middle-income countries’.  Members from Monash University were involved in delivering or chairing these presentations.  The Hon Mr Bob McMullan, Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance was also present to give a talk on Health in Australia’s aid program.

Besides faculty from Monash University, we also invited another APACPH member, Prof K R Thankappan from the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies in India to present in the non-communicable disease stream.  His talk covered 'Hypertension control by trained volunteers in a rural community in India'.

For APACPH, it created a good opportunity to introduce  APACPH to a wider global health community.

The first Grand Challenges Explorations funding round will consider proposals in four topic areas:

1) Creating new ways to protect against infectious diseases: Untried or unproven approaches to protect against infectious diseases, including harnessing natural or synthetic immune responses, or eliminating the need for an effective immune response.

2) Creating drugs or delivery systems that limit the emergence of resistance: Innovative ideas for discovering or delivering drugs that are less likely to lose effectiveness because of resistance developing in the disease-causing agent.

3) Creating new ways to prevent or cure HIV infection: Innovative ideas for HIV prevention or treatment methods that fall outside current research on vaccines, antiretroviral drugs, and other biomedical and behavior-change strategies.

4) Exploring the basis for latency in TB: Unconventional approaches to understanding latent TB infection, with the goal of discovering new ways to identify and eliminate latent infection and break the cycle of TB transmission.

Initial grants through the initiative will be for $100,000 each. Projects showing success will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of $1 million or more.

Once the first Explorations funding round is complete, the Gates Foundation will announce subsequent funding rounds. Topics may vary over time in order to cover a range of priorities in global health research.

Grant proposals for the first funding round will be accepted from March 31 through May 30, 2008; applicants must register their intent to submit a proposal by May 15, 2008.