News in general

Professor Tissa Wijeratne and Professor Wolfgang Grisold have teamed up on an expert article for the World Brain Day "Move together to End Parkinson's Disease".

Pain Alliance Europe (PAE) was aware that surveys were being conducted to find out how COVID-19 is affecting specific target groups. PAE has run a survey to find out how the pandemic affects chronic pain patients across Europe.

The study is funded by the European Commission and the first results will be used as input for a meeting of Ministries of Health in the EU in July 2020 under the current German EU Presidency, and addressing the future governance for primary and secondary use of health data, also in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Our country was relatively proactive in the containment measures it took, which meant that there was not a drastic and calamitous increase in the number of people infected and, necessarily, in the number of deaths caused by the virus.

During an extraordinary virtual meeting held on 2 April 2020, EMA’s human medicines committee (CHMP) gave recommendations on how the investigational antiviral medicine remdesivir should be used for treating coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in compassionate use programmes in the European Union.

The European Reference Netowrk for Epilepsy (EpiCARE) will hold a special webinar on Tuesday, April 7 with experts from Spain and Italy on the change to epilepsy care due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

WHO Europe launches an on-line consultation on the update of the WHO Comprehensive (Global) Mental Health Action Plan – GMHAP As determined by the World Health Assembly last year, WHO’s Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2020 has been extended to… Continue Reading

In a marathon debate of the European Council on 20-21 February, where the heads of state and government European Member States meet, representatives failed to agree on the EU budget for 2021-2027. This budget includes Horizon Europe, the next funding programme for research and innovation. Long term budget negotiations are known to be difficult, but this time around the departure of the UK, a major budget contributor, intensified the discussions. It is likely that more European summits will be needed to come to conclusion on this topic.

The BioMed Alliance started 2020 well, with a new President, President-Elect and a new Board Member. We look forward to working with them on the many interesting activities that we are planning this year.

In November 2019, CoCoCare consortium came together for the transnational meeting to discuss the progress of the first pilot of the course and start preparing for the second pilot. Colleagues from the European Academy of Neurology also joined the consortium to share their perspective. It was a busy but also a very productive day!

This year SIP celebrated ten years since establishment and on November 7th symposium “Bringing Pain Policy to the Next Decade” was organised in Brussels. More than 200 delegates from 24  countries participate on-site and many more followed symposium online.

“Health data standardisation workshop: looking at the implementation of the 11th International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF)” The Societal Impact of Pain (SIP) has organized a workshop "Health data standardisation workshop: looking at the implementation of ICD-11 and ICF" on November 6th 2019. More than 60 scientific experts, decisions makers and patients' representatives gathered at the Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic of Germany to the European Union in Brussels.

This year the eight edition of the conference entitled "Recent Advances in Clinical and Experimental Research on Dementia and Neurodegenerative Disorders" was held as usually in Bressanone, Italy. The event, which took place from 22 to 24 January, represents an interesting unique in the Italian panorama, starting from the choice to use English as the official language up to the calibre of the speakers.

ERN-RND provides educational webinars on rare neurological and neuromuscular diseases – in collaboration with the European Reference Network for Rare Neuromuscular Diseases (EURO-NMD) and the European Academy of Neurology.