Having met with almost all national representatives in Europe, witnessed the presentations of local activities both at the meeting in Berlin last year and the congress in Dublin this year, I have to conclude that the IPPNW student movement is alive and well in Europe. In countries like Sweden, Finland, the UK, Norway and Germany, IPPNW students are actively working together with the physicians of the affiliate and are shaping and influencing the affiliate through members in the board of directors or active participation in events, projects and publications. In countries like Estonia, Russia, Romania and Austria, the student groups are doing important and effective work themselves, without much contact to the national affiliate.

Then there are several countries with recruitment problems, where we have been unable to reach students. This problem has many causes. Together with former IPPNW student members and Herman Spanjaard, we are currently trying to acquire contacts in countries like France, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and Turkey. I’ve attached my mail to Mr. Spanjaard to illustrate our concerns. We have since talked a lot about this topic and have come up with a plan for a European student recruitment campaign, which we will be able to present in the coming weeks.

With the new international IPPNW student website in place and several students from Sweden, Estonia, Germany and Austria currently working on it, we have been able to create perfect conditions for future expansion, as well as interconnection of existing student groups, thus being able to draw on the extreme potential within the European student movement. In addition, the new international student projects, such as NWIP or ReCap attract a lot of attention all over the continent and will further aid the process of creating a truly European IPPNW student movement. As the IPPNW congresses in Berlin, Aaland, London or Dublin show, Europe’s great asset of mobility and proximity enable us to sit down together more often than most regional student groups and discuss the issues, which concern us. However, despite this ability, we must also not forget to support and develop better online communication, for example through mailing lists and discussion forums on the website.

Richard and me have compiled this report in the past weeks, building on the national reports handed in to us from the national representatives, as well as our own interviews with the different affiliates at the last student congress. Of course, this report cannot represent the entire range of activities, which characterize the European student movement, but it should serve as an examplatory listing of some of the outstanding activism, which students have shown in the past year. Also attached, you will find a personal report about the European Student Congress in Dublin, which again doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, but rather aims to describe the general feeling and impression of the meeting. In addition, there is a list of European Student Addresses and a list of countries, which we have identified as “countries with the possibility of expansion”, because we have so far been unable to reach medical students there. Finally, we’ve added Richards report concerning the European discussion on the new Guidelines, which should complete this European Annual Report 2004.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this report as much as we enjoyed compiling it,

Richard Fristedt, Alex Rosen
IPPNW European Student Representatives


Letter to Mr. Spanjaard

Dear Dr. Herman Spanjaard,

let me first introduce myself. My name is Alex Rosen, I am one of the two European Student Representatives and was elected to this office in Berlin last year. Last weekend, we hosted this year's European Student Congress, this time in Dublin, Ireland. It was a truly inspiring and motivating meeting and we as European Student Representatives would like to thank all of the people and affiliates who've helped to make it possible and who've supported students financially to assure their attendance.

More than 100 students from all over Europe attended this meeting. From all over Europe? Well, not quite. In recent years, we've had some problems recruiting students from several countries, even a few with otherwise highly active and motivated IPPNW affiliates. While countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, Austria, Russia, Germany and Estonia have managed to maintain high student membership (in Germany, for example, students make up more than 10% of the total members), some other countries have not.

The situation is especially worrying in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Spain, Luxembourg, Poland, Switzerland (the only active student lives in Ireland), Portugal, Serbia-Montenegro, Slovakia and Italy, where no active students are known to us. This development might not influence the work of IPPNW right now, but it might have serious repercussions in the future, when finding interested physicians to continue IPPNW's mission will pose an even greater problem than today.

We, as European Student Representatives have talked about this problem many times and have tried to start off initiatives to recruit new student members on a local level. Additionally, we've set up a new international student website, offering interested new-comers start-up kits for local groups, a lot of information about IPPNW, up-to-date charts of event and dates and everything else they might need to get started. We've also tried to get in contact with the physicians in countries, where we don't know of any student members. For example: Through Aurora Bilbao, we've managed to get into touch with a highly interested new student from Spain, who might be able to start a new local group. Dr. Blokzijl has managed to get in touch with an IFMSA-student, who also attended last week's conference in Dublin and might work towards furthering IPPNW in the Netherlands. However, these efforts have so far not produced any large movement and we therefore come to you for help.

As European IPPNW Chairman, you might be able to motivate national affiliates and convince them of the necessity of encouraging student participation in their initiatives. Finding interested students is often not as difficult as it would seem. Contacting local IFMSA-groups, talking to first-year students at the local university or hanging a few IPPNW-poster with our web-address (www.ippnw-students.org) and contact information (europe@ippnw-students.org) could already change a lot.

If Dublin has shown us anything it is that there's a number of interested students out there all over Europe, who just haven't heard of us yet. We would therefore ask you and the other physicians of IPPNW Europe to consider our request and to contact us, so that we can come up with some strategies for student recruitment together. We hope to hear from you soon, all the best from Duesseldorf, Germany,

Alex Rosen
European Student Representative


National Student Chapter Reports


Austria

The Austrian IPPNW/Omega group was founded one and a half years ago, because the students (most of them members at IFMSA or AMSA, the Austrian branch), wanted to do devote their time to more political goals. The biggest problems for the students in Austria were on the one hand to become conscious of the group identity and to find their place within the Austrian NGO-landscape on the other. Most of the time of the monthly meetings was spent in discussing this problems and looking for suitable projects. A small but motivated group has emerged from this process and has since participated in anti-war protest marches and meetings like the Austrian Social Forum.

But they’ve also begun a project called the “Open Source Software” project, which is aimed at promoting open-source software in NGO’s like IPPNW to combat the information asymmetry. In May, two workshops are planned, the first one dealing with the threat of nuclear arms, the other with ethics and palliative care. This will also be a possibility to recruit new members. A Public Health Day, organized by the IPPNW students at the university of Vienna is another step in that direction.

One of the long term projects is the admission of a Global Health module into the new Curriculum and to organize the possibility for students to work in refugee camps in Austria and Macedonia. The provision of medical and psychological care for refugees within Austria is another goal. Furthermore, some Austrian students were involved with the NWIP project and are helping with the international Student Website, working on a discussion forum, open-source mailing lists, better possibilities for national reps to change their pages, and generally improving efficiency.


Denmark

The Danish IPPNW Section (DLMK) currently has eight paying student members. Two-thirds are medical students, the last third are students with another background working with NWIP and paying as associate members. Furthermore, DLMK and IFMSA-SCORP have a special arrangement where SCORP pays a common membership for its members. In return, they receive the newsletter in all the IFMSA offices in Denmark and have access to international IPPNW student activities. A couple are also subscribed to the student server. SCORP has a short summary of activities and contact info on the DLMK home page and the NWIP are described on the Danish IFMSA Homepage. This arrangement has worked out to the advantage of both parts.

The student group in Denmark focused their energy on nuclear disarmament. All activities in 2003/2004 have been connected to disarmament and the war in Iraq. The Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project (NWIP) is coordinated internationally from Denmark and Sweden. The project and its results have been described in detail in the annual report of IPPNW. In short, the project advocates and raise awareness amongst university students, trains student activists and empowers student groups in nuclear weapon states to speak out. Danish students have participated in delegations to India, Pakistan, the UK (three times) and the US. They’ve also been to trainings in India, Berlin, the UK, Pakistan, USA and Ireland. They have presented NWIP at the IFMSA march meetings in Estonia and Venezuela and at McMaster University, Canada.

The Danish group is multi-disciplined and its main focus in 2004 was to create a good communication strategy for the project and standardized training material, up-dating the NWIP section of the IPPNW Student Website, formulating an evaluation strategy, adjusting the method so that the project became attractive to students from a different background than health. Danish students have also participated in dialogues with decision-makers in London, and Moscow (twice).

IPPNW students have been asked to train SCORP students at national seminars in the health consequences of war, ABC disarmament, the war in Iraq and student activism. SCORP and IPPNW students also participated in the campaign against the war in Iraq together. Under the banner “Health professionals for peace”, they participated in the large international demonstrations in 2003 and 2004 and a couple of students wrote letters to the editor published in national newspapers. Some facts to illustrate the Danish students’ activism: One Danish medical student (Caecilie Buhmann) is represented on the DLMK national board. One fourth of DLMK funds are given to student activities - especially the NWIP. Danish IPPNW students also contributed articles to the SLMK/DLMK newsletter in every edition.

Estonia

The Estonian student group has flourished in the past years, contributing to the European Student Scene by attending congresses all over Europe and organizing projects within their own country. In September, they joined Russian, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish students in an IPPNW conference in Aaland. In November, the group from Tartu University visited a Reception Center for Asylum Seekers and joined the IFMSA meeting in Budapest in December. In February, they met with IPPNW and SCORP students in Helsinki, Finland and with other IFMSA students in Venezuela in March. Through seminars at the university, they were able to promote IPPNW and attract new members. With meetings twice a month, an exhibition on landmines is planned for the future, as is a participation in the Finnish Peace Test.


Finland

Many activities of IPPNW students in Finland have been organised in co-operation with the national affiliate of IPPNW in Finland, PSR (Physicians for Social Responsibility) Finland, and with FiMSIC, the national affiliate of IFMSA in Finland. On a national level, three national seminars for medical students were organised: one about refugees and medical practice, one about HIV/aids and one about drugs. The aim was to provide information about important topics that have so far been poorly covered in the Finnish medical curriculum; consequently, all the seminars gathered plenty of interested students together.

Peace Test is an international study coordinated by the University of Texas, aiming to investigate teenagers’ attitudes towards peace, violence and racism. In Finland, 500 teenagers from four cities answered to the Peace Test questionnary, and, afterwards, IPPNW students led a discussion about the questions in the classrooms. The answers were collected and analysed in a report which clearly showed that peace education is needed in schools. IPPNW students also gave sexual education in secondary schools. Seminars about reproductive health and sexual education were organised for educators.

Local activities were numerous and diverse - they included organising teach-ins and information campaigns about contemporary matters (e.g. HIV/aids, iv drugs) for medical students, singing and playing music in rest-homes (!), selling PSR-Finland T-shirts (“The world is not saved. Do you want to save it now?”), collecting medical text books to Tansania and organising blood donation competitions. One of the most succesful and best-loved project was to arrange teddy bear hospitals to nurseries, with first-year medical students playing doctors and children taking their teddy bear to see a doctor. Finnish IPPNW students participated to the IPPPNW students’ European meeting in Berlin. One IPPNW student also attended the Dialogue-seminar in London, as Finnish IPPNW students are planning to start the Dialogue project in Finland as well.

As PSR Finland is a largely student-run organisation, IPPNW students have also been very actively involved in the international activities of PSR Finland (including development-co-operation projects, organisation of an international course on global health etc.). In the near future, planning the student activities for the IPPNW World Conference 2006 in Helsinki will be a major task for Finnish IPPNW students. In addition, plans for starting the Dialogue project in Finland have been made. This is not to say that all the projects mentioned above would not be continued…


France

Despite many attempts to contact former French IPPNW students (some of whom are now IPPNW physicians), we’ve not been able to make contact with interested French students. Short-term groups in Strasbourg, founded by German students spending a semester abroad have, to our regret, not lasted the test of time, so that France remains a white spot on the European IPPNW map.


Germany

The German IPPNW student community is rather large – with active student groups in more than 20 cities /from Hamburg’s three students to Düsseldorf 22). All in all, there are approximately 1000 IPPNW students - 837 of these are paying IPPNW members in the German affiliate. That’s more than 10% of the total members. One of the student members is also represented in Germany’s IPPNW board of directors and several students play active roles within the physicians movement. Besides the regular student activities, such as the publication of the annual AMATOM, Germany’s high quality IPPNW student magazine, and the famous Practice and Engage-Medical Exchange Program, which has again enabled more than 15 German students to practice and engage abroad and has invited students from other countries to do the same in Germany, there have been loads of other activities, both on local and national levels.

On a national level, German IPPNW students have organized an action day named “Universities for Peace”. There were demonstrations (like in Leipzig) or lectures on peace in poetry and literature (like in Duesseldorf). Nationwide more than a dozen universities participated and the activities were held across the spectrum of faculties. Informative discussions and debates were organized in Marburg, Ulm, Duesseldorf and Leipzig on topics like the conflict in the Middle East (with Israeli and Palestinian students debating with the audience), the war on Iraq or the conflict in Afghanistan. The winner of last year’s German IPPNW’s Peace Film Award, “The Children of Baghdad” was shown in front of large audiences in many cities and through this, many new members were won.

The German national representatives did their best in linking up the different student groups, which led to several invitations and exchanges and also to the creation of several local IPPNW websites. The annual student meeting, organized by the local group of Duesseldorf, had the theme “Alternative Conflict Management” and incorporated, amongst other things, a Model-UN workshop. German IPPNW students have helped organize the European Congress “Culture for Peace” and the upcoming Congress on Nuclear War and Nuclear Energy, both in Berlin, as well as the German national IPPNW meeting in Ulm last March. They’re also actively involved in the preparations for next year’s congress on “Medicine and Morality” in Erlangen.

The local groups have all had different themes which they worked on. While the students in Berlin, Rostock and Tuebingen devoted their time and effort to the care for “paperless people”, illegal refugees and asylum seekers in their cities, the students in Dresden worked on their photo-project “Strangers and Strangeness”, which aims to fight racism and prejudices in schools. The student group in Ulm has managed to incorporate a “Peace and Health” course into the medical curriculum, an issue which the local group in Duesseldorf is currently working on. The group in Hamburg has helped to organize a large IPPNW congress last summer, the students in Leipzig have continued their refugee-project and the students in Witten are currently preparing next year’s national student meeting.


Ireland

Physicians for Social Responsibility Ireland was born in the hot days of May 2003 when the Irish students came back from the Berlin summit. As a small group (of 3!) they sought contact to other “socially responsible souls” in Ireland and ran a series of talks to this affect, advertised in all the Dublin medical schools, on social issues such as Homelessness, Mental Illness and Immigration that affected health. Through these talks, the group grew to more than 60 medical students and it was then that the Irish group felt secure enough to announce that they would host the European Student Congress.

Apart from organizing this fantastic congress, they have tried to raise awareness amongst students of broader issues (poverty, inequality, marginalisation, unfair trade, arms trafficking and proliferation etc. etc) that affect health. They’ve also tried to discover ways to use their voices and position as doctors and medical students to improve these issues. Above all, the Irish students became aware that a group such as PSR must be enjoyable, something that adds to the lives of its members – “privileged young adults who want to make a positive impact on the world, instead of martyrs to a cause or holier-than-thou puritans”.

In the future, we’re bound to hear a lot more from this active and ambitious group. Some of their plans for the future include conducting research on health status and access to health among Dublin’s homeless population in conjunction with a group of inner-city GPs, campaigning for a scholarship system in each of the medical colleges for students from low-income countries and campaigning for the implementation of meaningful Global Health education in the colleges’ medical curricula.

In addition, they would also like to increase their involvement in international and European campaigns within the IPPNW network, particularly NWIP and nuclear disarmament advocacy. Finally, they’re planning to continue information and awareness-events at the universities.


The Netherlands

There is an active IFMSA-student who heard about IPPNW through a former Dutch student member. She came to the European Student Congress in Dublin and agreed to serve as a contact person for IPPNW in the Netherlands. It remains to be seen how recent attempts to promote active student recruitment within the Netherlands will fare.


Norway

The Norwegian IPPNW student community is slowly growing, with close contact to the IPPNW physicians. The students actively contributed to the international student project NWIP, with representatives at meetings in Delhi in March and in Islamabad in November 2003 and an active dialogue with decision makers at home, at the Pakistani and Indian embassies. They also participated in the European IPPNW meeting in London in November, the Nordic seminar on nuclear weapons in September and IPPNW’s Refugee Camp Project.


Romania

The Romanian student group has been around for some time now. Three of the students have participated at the IPPNW European Student meeting in Berlin last summer, the rest have been involved for two years in the very successful project of blood donation and all have seen an IPPNW presentation. The current aim is to develop new projects and training new members, which happened last March, for example, in form of a fundraising and project management training.

Also, the students are involved with the creation of a small, Public health oriented organization that would allow a separation from SCORP and IFMSA and help lay the foundation for a stronger IPPNW Romanian affiliation in the future. Projects are currently developed in both organizations in a form of collaboration. However, since IFMSA is involved in university politics, there seem to be some problems concerning this partnership.
In September, the students attempted to develop an environment project for recycling of medical trash from hospitals and medical universities. However, there were some problems ensuring the continuation of the project.

In November, the Organization for Refugees and Immigrants was offered collaboration in a project concerned with education in prevention of sexual transmitted diseases for refugees and immigrants. The result was that the organization agreed to collaborate, once the project was launched, but could not offer enough security. The plan changed into being able to send medical students to work as volunteers to help the medical doctor that was taking care of refugees for this organization. Again, it was difficult to continue with this project as there were some problems finding people to do it. Apparently, most of the work and effort rests on the shoulder of just one student and that should be changed in the future.

In December, Ivona participated at the IFMSA Study Session on Refugees and Minorities, which concerned itself with the Peace Test and a Minority Festival, which will take place in 2005. Currently, these activities are being prepared, as is another blood donation campaign, which involves many people who are not actively participanting IPPNW students yet and could therefore be a great way to win some new students for the organization.


Russia

The Russian IPPNW students in St. Petersburg are working with children in the school on the basis of their ecological group. There is a cycle of lectures and workshops devoted to the issues of public health, patient rights, humans rights, IPPNW-activities, medical consequences of using nuclear arms, harm of alcohol, drugs and tobacco and the topic of HIV and AIDS. Sexual education conducted by the students met with some affront from the parents.

A photo-exhibition entitled “World without War” was started as a kind of competition with more than 30 participants (students, ex-students and doctors, university staff) and about 250 photos.


Spain

There are currently two interested students, who study in Bilbao and whom we have contact with. Sadly, they could both not make the journey to Dublin this year. We hope to hear more from them in the future but see the problem of setting up a local group without ever having been to a conference of IPPNW.


Sweden

The student group in Sweden has in the last years consisted of a small group of dedicated students. Now the group is growing and has lots of ideas and plans for the future, especially after the European Student Conference in Dublin. There are about 10-15 active students, out of almost 100 student members. There is a lot of cooperation with IFMSA, especially the SCORP-groups, which in parts share the same agenda. There are six universities with medical schools, in six different cities; Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund, Goeteborg, Linkoeping and Umeaa.

Together with the IFMSA Peace & Refugee group (SCORP), the Swedish IPPNW students organized a series of lectures about nuclear weapons in three of our six medical colleges. In Uppsala there was also a poster exhibition, which was shown in the University Hospital. The whole idea was to try to raise awareness about the issues among other medical students.

The great tradition of the “Nuclear Movie Night” was also started, with a film about nuclear weapons and a discussion and some food afterwards. The first film to be shown was the 1964 Stanley Kubrick classic: “Dr Strangelove – or how I stopped worrying and love the bomb”. There are plans to continue this series in at least four cities! Next up is the film “13 days” about the Cuban missile crisis.

Flyers are being published to attract new members, the Mayors for Peace initiative is being supported, work on the “brilliant NWIP“ is being continued as more and more people join the project and the students are regularly updating the Swedish Homepage. Going public, the students have also written articles for the SLMK paper about national and international student activities, and are currently checking if any other local newspapers or medical magazines would accept an article from them.


Switzerland

We’ve been able to identify one active Swiss student, who is currently studying in Ireland. However, we’re in contact with the Swiss concerning more recruitment and hope to have some active Swiss students in the future.


The United Kingdom

Medsin has had a vast amount of support over the last few years from Medact. Still, most Medsin members do not know what Medact does or how they can get involved. This year we are looking to build a stronger partnership with Medact. By getting more involved in the advocacy work of Medact, the British students are hoping to be able to voice their concerns about the injustice and inequality that negatively impacts the health of the world’s populations. They are developing a Medsin Alumni group that will be closely linked to Medact. This will provide a way for Medsin members to stay in touch with each other after graduation.

Finally, the students are aiming to provide support and guidance to those who may be considering the less conventional career paths in areas such as humanitarian aid, tropical medicine and public health.

The Nuffield Trust invited Bryony Whipp (Medsin-UK President) and Emily Spry (IFMSA President) to attend a trilateral conference (UK, US and Canada) in Washington DC in April 2004. The delegates spent three days looking at how global health issues should be incorporated into education, research and service. All countries agreed that there was a need to integrate global health education into the medical curriculum and were keen to support student initiatives to take this forward. Emily Spry and Bryony Whipp are currently looking at ways of coordinating and scaling up students’ efforts through the IFMSA..

In October 2003, a group of students from all over Europe and Chris Willott and Jaime Miranda from the International Health and Medical Education Centre at University College London met to discuss integration of global health into the undergraduate medical curriculum. The students were mainly drawn from IFMSA and IPPNW students’ groups. The aim of the group is to work together to increase the number of global health courses being taught in the undergraduate medical curriculum. The main method being used to achieve this aim is a website, www.globalhealtheducation.org, which will be going online in the summer of 2004.


Peace through Health
The IPPNW European Student Conference 2004 in Dublin

Faced with the nearly impossible task to sum up a conference like the one we’ve witnessed last week in Dublin, you ask yourself: “How can I even attempt to describe how it was?” Truly, this sometimes seems like an impossible task. So let’s just start with the facts and see where it goes from there...

Last week, over 100 students from all over Europe convened on the cute little village of Glencree, a few miles south of Dublin, where they attended this year’s European Student Conference. They came from as far away as Russia or Romania, from the UK and Estonia, Austria and Norway. The German and Swedish affiliates sent large groups of students, as did Finland, while smaller affiliates such as Denmark or the Netherlands were also duly represented. Many of the participants came from Ireland, a country that previously didn’t have many active IPPNW students. Through the organization of the conference, however, the three initiators, Paula, Sile and Peter, were able to assemble a fantastic team, including students from Malaysia, Lebanon, Japan or Botswana, who all study in Dublin and took part in the conference.

For four days, the lilac-covered walls of the “Peace and Reconciliation Center”, itself a former army barrack, reverberated with the spirit of enthusiasm - the kind of spirit that suddenly appears, when motivated students get together and talk about the subjects that touch them most. In the case of European IPPNW students these were, amongst others, the issues of “Peace through Health”, the promotion of global health, the peculiarities of life in today’s climate of fear, the problem of drugs, which are only available for one-fourth of the world’s population, different ways of reducing prejudices in medical practice, the possibilities to introduce social responsibility into the everyday medical routine and, last but not least, ways of improving the structures within the IPPNW student movement itself.

Fueled by the provoking speeches of well-known IPPNW physicians such as Allan Connolly or Neil Arya, the students were able to question many aspects of their own thinking and beliefs and in the workshops further examined common misconceptions in the world of today. All in all, it was one of those conferences, which you left, feeling that a few veils had just been swept away, which had been covering your eyes until then. Other inspiring speakers included Dr. Ceppie Merry, a young consultant doctor who spends much of her time working in development work for Africa, Dr. David Hickey who spoke of “Alternative Approaches to the War on Terror” and his own solidarity program for Cuba, Coalmhe Butterly, of Palestine fame, who presented ways to peacefully resist the many injustices of today and of course Dr. Austin O’Carroll, a General Practitioner and himself physically impaired, who talked about “Equality and Awareness in General Practice”.

Apart from these motivating workshops, organizations like Medicines Sans Frontiers or Amnesty International were given the opportunity to present their work and thereby offer concrete examples of “Peace through Health”. As another new feature of an IPPNW conference, the UN-Role playing game offered a group of 15 students the opportunity to slip into the role of UN-delegates for one day and to discover the opportunities and limitations of the UN and the veto-plagued Security Council. Furthermore, the conference managed to include workshops on stress management, laughter meditation, leadership and motivation, culminating in the creation of a “Mandala of Peace and Healing” on the premises of the Center, which served as the perfect backdrop for the closing ceremony on Sunday evening.

But it was also a conference of diligent “old-style” IPPNW work. Ongoing international student projects were presented and worked on. The Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project (NWIP), which promotes meetings with decisions-makers and organizes discussions amongst students in nuclear states had its own workshop, as did the Refugee Camp Project, which will organize an international program of applied “Peace through Health” in a Palestinian Refugee Camp near Bethlehem coming August. Finally, the new IPPNW website was presented and ways of improving its use were discussed amongst interested students.

As in years before, the European Student Conference was also an opportunity for the student participants, who came to Dublin from so many different countries and backgrounds, to exchange their views and ideas, to inform each other of their activities and to present the topics they worked on back home. In a workshop on the new student guidelines, many different voices were heard and during the presentations of the different affiliates, every country had the chance to raise issues, which were important to them – whether it was the introduction of “Peace through Health” into the curriculum in Norway or the promotion of open-source software by the Austrians, who seek to combat the “asymmetry of information”.

True to its fame, the European Student Conference also provided the participants with an outstanding social program, starting every day with extremely cool wake-up dips in Glencree’s very own “outdoor pool” (a.k.a. “lake”). Yoga sessions, meditation classes, a Ghost tour of Dublin and a hike in the nearby hills (accompanied by the best, Irish weather-men had to offer) followed suit, while the evenings were filled with music, as bands played and students danced the nights away, sometime not knowing whether or not they were shaking their hips to the sound of African drums or to the bowrans of traditional Irish reels and jigs.

After four such days of learning, discussing, planning and exchanging, the participants parted again, returning home with some of the spirit of this year’s meeting, taking with them new ideas, new angles from which to look at things, new impressions ... and hopefully also new friends. For this and much, much more, which cannot even be remotely summed up in this terribly short article, I want to thank the organizers once again. Thank you for this spectacular conference, which by far exceeded everyone's expectations and set definite new standards for European Student meetings in the future. Your excellent organization, your spirit and your contagious smiles made the weekend more than just a conference; it made it into an experience, and it gave a lot of people a lot of motivation to stay on, to join or to get to know IPPNW and with it the possibilities for medical students to change something about this world and to make a difference. And isn’t that what we are all about?


Alex Rosen
European Student Representative



Photos and Background information can be viewed on our website:
www.ippnw-students.org/Ireland2004/Ireland2004.html

Countries with possibility of expansion

Belgium
We never got a reply to our mails.

The Czech Republic
We're in contact with Vaclav Stukavec (stukav@volny.cz), who writes excellent German, but told us that there are no students in his country.

France
We never got a reply to our mails. The only student contact is, to our knowledge, no longer working within the French IPPNW

Greece
Kaintatzis Antonis told us to send all correspondence to helmsiceb@yahoogroups.com, but we never got an answer from this address.

Italy
Richard got this address from Ahmed; lisandro4@hotmail.com. Italian physician delegates at the London conference replied to our email saying that it is hard to recruit students. Italian physicians contact info; osvaldodiandrea@libero.it; michele.dipaolantonio@katamail.com

The Netherlands
Our only contact is Marieke Blokzijl and she somehow got an IFMSA-girl named Carlaa to attend the meeting in Dublin, so I guess that we now have a contact person in the NL again.

Poland
Richard got these addresses from Polish delegates at the London conference:
Bohdan.Wasilewski@heel.com.pl , monik_5n@yahoo.com
We never got an answer from them, but four Polish Pharmacy students turned up in Dublin, though they don't know these people and disappeared half-way during the conference (!?)

Portugal
We never got a reply to our mails.

Serbia-Montenegro
We've tried to contact Stanislava Macura (macura@neobee.net) several times, but haven't gotten an answer from her yet.

Spain
Through Aurora Bilbao, We're in good contact with the following student from Bilbao, who's set on getting something started there, but she couldn't make it to Dublin ;-( so we haven't gotten a chance to meet her yet:
Aida Ezzeddrine (aida_ezze@hotmail.com). Go ahead to incorporate these students as a student chapter?

Slovakia
We never got a reply to our mails.

Switzerland
Claudia Buergler from the PSR Secretariat (sekretariat@ippnw.ch) answered one of our mails, saying that there weren't any students in PSR-Switzerland.

Turkey
Richard were contacted by this student: ozgulek@yahoo.com
We never got an answer from him, but from the physician we contacted at the same time (met at the London meeting) Dr. Derman Bztok. He told us that "due to legal restrictions we have not been able to incorporate student activities to Turkish Affiliate".

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