More than 5000 participants from about 90 countries all around the world took part at the 30th International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine in Brussels, Belgium from March 9th to March 12th, 2010.  The declared goal of this meeting was to celebrate 30 years of intensive care and emergency medicine and hopefully help plan the next 30 years. more…

I have seen many people die in the nearly three decades I have worked as a clinician. I was, however, confronted with a totally different perspective of dying while attending a symposium “noch mal leben/vivere ancora [to live again]“  on palliative care at the free university of Bozen/Bolzano in South Tyrol in Italy on February 29th, 2010. more…

The European Research Council (ERC) unanimously elected Prof. Helga Nowotny, an eminent social scientist, as the new ERC President on February 19th, 2010. Helga Nowotny is currently the ERC’s vice-President. She is Professor emeritus of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich, and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Vienna University. She is also a former research fellow of King’s College in Cambridge. She will take office on March 1st, 2010. more…

Nutrition in Critical Care Medicine was the main topic in the lectures at the ‘Wiener Intensivmedizinische Tage’ in Vienna (February 10th to 13th, 2010), one of the biggest ICU meetings in the German speaking part of Europe.  In the corridors the most discussed topic was Peter Sawicki’s dismissal as head of the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG).

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The avalanche danger level was the second highest possible this week in most parts of the Alps. But the warning did not help: six alpinists died in avalanches within 24 hours in Austria. Although the scientific knowledge about the pathophysiology of being buried under an avalanche has improved, and the number of hospitals with technical equipment allowing resuscitation of deep hypothermic avalanche victims without spontaneous circulation have grown, the number of people who die in avalanches is not declining. Wolfgang Ladenbauer from the Austrian Mountain Rescue Organisation told me that the reason is the absolute number of ski mountaineers has increased considerably. Also, the efforts to teach alpinists about alpine dangers and better equipment may have lead to a decrease of fear rather than an increase of knowledge in alpinists. So therefore the number of casualties has not declined.

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‘The H1N1 pandemic-are we prepared?’ was the first hot topic at the 22nd congress of the European society of intensive care medicine (ESICM) in Vienna from 11th to 14th October 2009. The question of whether there will there be enough intensive care facilities for critically ill patients in a second wave of the pandemic was discussed extensively. Steve Webb from Canberra, Australia reported that, in the influenza A/H1N1 pandemic that affected Australia and New Zealand during the 2009 southern hemisphere winter, 133 patients with influenza had to have mechanical ventilation and 68 patients with severe influenza-associated acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) were treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation ECMO. more…