| This will be the Fourth Forum on Respiratory Tract Infections and we intend to maintain the
quality of presentation and debate achieved in previous meetings.We are grateful to our sponsors
for their academic and material support, which permits us to stage the event not only at moderate
cost but also with superlative content. The diverse nature of the audience - from complementary backgrounds including clinical, laboratory and industrial therapeutic research, primary care, internal and respiratory medicine, and infectious disease / clinical microbiology - adds significant interactive dimensions to discussion and conclusions.We hope to attract you and your colleagues from all of these disciplines to join us in Barcelona. The program plan will remain as before with sequential sessions - plenary lectures and symposia, some with debate format - and there will be poster sessions with interactive discussions. A preliminary program listing follows. However, given the expert nature of our audience, we once again request suggestions as to content from prospective delegates.Your view is important to us. Since the millennium, at a time of burgeoning bacterial resistance, a number of Pharmaceutical Companies have withdrawn from the anti-infective sector and others have restricted their antiinfective R&D programs. It is all the more important that we meet to discuss the optimal use of existing agents, recently licensed antimicrobials and to fully explore the potential of the candidate compounds scheduled for, or currently in development. The RTI Forum offers a unique opportunity to discuss these issues with experts in Respiratory Infection both within the Faculty and in the delegate audience, in an intimate and informal atmosphere. This facet of the meeting has always proved of great value as a contribution to debate and will continue. Equally, the balance of aetiological agents appears to be changing, perhaps in response to patient or institutional factors. Novel approaches are required for emerging priorities, both in disease prevention and control and its broader management. New epidemics are in progress, some less publicly visible than others, which present challenges, some, as with avian influenza, potentially with global consequences. Interaction between delegates from various continents is thus essential. These are contentious issues with immediate implications for us all.You are invited to debate them with the Faculty of the 3rd RTI Forum in 2004. |
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Giuliana Gialdroni Grassi (Honorary President) |
Anthoni Torres Marti - Peter Ball (Co-chairmen) |
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