Watch Sweden.
Stockholm is on my bucket list to visit. I am all the more determined after visiting the House of Sweden this evening and meeting the lovely Ambassador and Minister of Health. For the next ten weeks they are featuring a program on world class state of the art medical improvements and issues in conjunction with their Public Health Festival of sorts. Tonight they put on the Ritz, a cute play by college students, treated us to healthy fare of shredded carrots, haricots verts (green beans), varieties of cheeses, a cabbage beefy burritoish eggrollish thing, and pasta- in a buffet fit for a Fitness Fan. There were shot glasses of milk to top it off. Not for nunthin does Sweden boast the people in Europe with the longest life longeivity and healthiest population. They live long, strong and healthy with the median age of death for women at 83. Median means half live longer than that. They have free public health-everyone is covered and administered both in conjunction with local and national level medical oversight bodies. Forget the Canadian system- examine the Swedish one. This is really exciting.
The House of Sweden has a modern building on the edge of the Potomac sandwiched between and overlooking the Georgetown Harbor and the Kennedy Center. They served healthy smoothies on the roof tonight and packed the house with people examining the new technologies and reading exhibits introducing the town to all things Swede.
Most Mesmerizing was the Medical imaging machine being developed at the world class medical research University Karolinska Institutet (which by some measures ranks higher than Yale Med.) This Medical School has world class expertise in brain research and neurobiology. It has developed an imaging machine that allows one to visualize in 4D more or less the inside of a brain to the tiniest ganglia (marketed now as the virtual autopsy-where every part of a body can be viewed on the imaging screen and manipulated to see every angle with a touch of the screen). This is going to help I imagine in treating strokes, aneurysms and other brain malfunctions. This imagine technology is also going to be used in the cutting edge research into neonatal biomedical areas to help with fetal health and surgeries as well as to assist with fertilization. It has been doing cutting edge world class research in neonatology focusing on fetal brain and lung development.
The photo and Exhibit exhibition runs from March 25, 2010 through April 28 at the House of Sweden.
Many many thanks to the Ambassador and the Ministry of Health for putting on this exhibition, which I believe is a must see for everyone at the US Department of Health and Human Services - as well as anyone concerned with issues of our epidemic childhood obesity problem. Clearly we have a lot to learn from the Swedes.
No comments:
Post a Comment