Becoming a netizen in 2006!

Over the last few days we have been reviewing our work in 2006 at CHC. I discovered that it was a special year of writing and interviews for me because unlike the past years most of these papers and interviews are already available on the net. Have I truly become a Netizen?

• I wrote about the ‘Savar to Cuenca experience – 5 years of the growth of the Global Peoples Health Movement', a reflection on the growth of the People's Health Movement (PHM).
  
• I was interviewed by the ejournal of Social Medicine on the PHM plans, priorities and challenges one year after the Second Peoples Health Assembly. This is now available in English and Spanish
  
• At the Global Forum for Health Research I was interviewed by Real Health News about my experience of being both an academic researcher and an activist.
  
• At Forum 10 in Cairo in October 2006, a plenary session was facilitated on the new concept and metaphor of ‘ The Social Vaccine’ as a strategy for action on the social determinants of health and to moderate the over emphasis on bio-medical determinism. The background paper I put together with others is a work in progress. This year an extended version will appear in the BMJ and the Forum report. Look out for it.
  
• At the Forum 10, a special session was facilitated on Research Priorities for Schools of Public Health in the South and I prepared a compilation of recommendations on the theme from a series of recent sources.
  
• Finally for the recently concluded Medico Friend Circle meeting on Public Health Education in India in December 2006, at the National Tuberculosis Institute in Bangalore, Thelma and I wrote a series of reflections on Public Health Education- Policies, Initiatives, Challenges, Opportunities, and Threats. These are now available on as part of the MFC bulletin 320-321.

Very soon a special learning centre archives will be set up on the CHC website which will a lot of material that the CHC team has written or facilitated over the years. Watch out for it!

It seems a symbol of the changing times that while we have just started recounting a public health journey that started in 1971 on this blog and have hardly reached 1972, the journey of 2006 has gone on the net so effortlessly in all sorts of spaces on the world wide web! The rest of the journey will soon be online too once we finishing sorting and collecting notes and photos from all our dustly files and albums.