Next Wednesday, I'm going to be speaking on a panel with Shannon and two other experts (Kae Dakin of Kae Dakin Consulting and Susan Blake of GRC Direct) on both online and offline fundraising strategies and tactics for global health organizations as part of the Global Health Council's annual Conference.  We're planning for a lively discussion and solid audience participation, so I'll likely come away with some other useful tips to share.

1. Click on the following link: www.ghdonline.org/ic/.
2. While on the TB Infection Control Community page, click on the “Sign up” link in the upper right hand corner.
3. Complete your registration details, ensuring that you put a check mark on the TB Infection Control Community.
4. Click the “Sign up” button on the bottom of the page -- Now, you’re a member of the community! You will receive an activation link by email. Click on the link to activate your membership.
5. Go back to the site, sign in by clicking on “Sign in”, and go to “My Profile”. In “My Profile”, you can set your email notification settings to “instant” so that you will receive an email notifying you when the ATE questions are posted.  
6. To respond to these questions, you can reply directly to your email notifications, or you can click on the discussion link on the site and click “Reply”.
7. To start a new discussion or post a question addressed to our HSAN expert, click on “Start discussion”, or simply send your thoughts as an e-mail to ic@ghdonline.org. 

Many of the presentations this weekend focused on vision and eye care, and I got a dose of the staggering global statistics:  38 to 40 million people worldwide are blind, and over 130 million people are significantly visually impaired (meaning they cannot read, etc.).  Much of this blindness is preventable--and throughout the weekend there were many calls to action.

Conference speakers were full of inspirational stories, such as a keynote by Al Sommer, MD, MHS, Professor and Dean Emeritus, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose friend in the 1970s in India asked, ‘Why can’t we mass produce cataract surgery like McDonald’s mass produces hamburgers?’  His friend went on to do this, and now performs 14 cataract surgeries per hour using patient transportation and recovery systems they set up.

And Dr. Susan Blumenthal, with whom I had the pleasure of traveling to Israel last year, spoke of an initiative during her tenure as the Assistant U.S. Surgeon General called ‘Missiles to Mammograms’ through which she convinced the DoD, CIA, and NASA to convert the same technology used to track missiles in space into machines that detect breast cancer and save thousands of lives.

And finally, I thought I'd share this list of useful health-related open education sites I learned about during a great session on the topic:

• Red Atlas – A free, electronic atlas of eye disorders designed to help Ophthalmologists and Optometrists-in-training learn to identify eye diseases through pattern recognition.
• Pubmed Central – the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
• O.N.E. Network – A robust ophthalmologist network and customized learning program.
• Open Medicine – A peer-reviewed, independent, open-access journal based in Canada.
• Bioline International – A scholarly publishing cooperative that hosts over 40 open journals from developing countries.
• PLoS Medicine – A  peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal publishing important original research and analysis relevant to human health.

Simpler and safer methods for making the Phase II TB drug candidate PA-824 have been proposed to the TB Alliance by two winners of a scientific challenge. These solutions may save the TB Alliance and end-users a substantial amount of money, thus allowing more patients to be treated for less.

The two winning proposals were identified as coming from a scientist in China, and a research fellow in Germany.

"These were unique ideas," said Dr. Takushi Kaneko, the TB Alliance chemist who oversaw the Challenge process. "It was certainly worth going through the exercise."

Under the InnoCentive Challenge agreement, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, intellectual property related to the solutions goes to the TB Alliance, and each of the winners receives US$20,000. Following a tender process, the TB Alliance has now selected a contract research organization to see if these ideas can be reduced to a practical synthesis.

Forum One has promoted use of online communities in order to advance research for many years.  In 2000 we began working with an international group of researchers in AIDS economics and policy and hosted bi-annual calls for papers to leading researchers in the economic and policy implications of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in developing countries.  The reward for 10-20 winners each time was their fully funded travel and participation in a global HIV/AIDS conference and presentation of their research during a professional forum.