ISH President-Elect Lindholm: The ISH and ESH have been sisters for many, many years. The ISH has a focus now on the developing world. There are more than 1 billion people in the world who suffer from high blood pressure and there is quite a job to undertake to promote awareness of hypertension and some sort of treatment.
I will be president-elect of the ISH until October 2006, and I will become president at the end of the ISH meeting in Fukuoka, Japan and remain in office until the end of the 2008 Joint ISH-ESH meeting in Berlin. The planning for the Fukuoka meeting is going very well, and I’m sure that we will have a huge attendance and a lot of interesting science to discuss. There will be many Satellite Symposia held in several parts of Asia. Fukuoka is a lovely place in an interesting part of the world. I do encourage Europeans to come, because this is a very interesting part of the world, which, unbelievably, many people haven’t actually seen. Japan is not just Tokyo; a lot of people from Europe go to Tokyo and Osaka and that is it, but there is so much to see. Ad if you are interested in culture, Fukuoka is a gold mine.