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On 20 and 21 May MSF Scientific Day in London will kick off three events presenting research from the MSF field programs around the world. MSF Scientific days showcase how the organisation/charity is pushing to improve the effectiveness of medical humanitarian aid and raise awareness of the fight against neglected diseases. As well as the London event this year there is also the MSF Scientific Day South Asia in New Delhi and MSF Scientific Day Southern Africa in Johannesburg. Three Countries with a worldwide audience. Once again, we are proud to be sponsoring the Scientific Days and we are looking forward to attending the London event.

F1000Research and MSF have long enjoyed a productive relationship built upon the mutual belief that research on public health emergencies should be communicated openly and made publically accessible to all. To this end, MSF have a dedicated Gateway on F1000Research which allows them to share their research outputs and show their commitment to bringing quality medical care to people caught in crisis.

In 2015 the conference was livestreamed from the UK and India and was watched by 5200 people from 115 countries. Last year also saw the introduction of an “Innovation day” where there were exciting presentations on new technologies such as using drones to transport samples from remote health centres and mobilising local people to obtain reliable geographical information to trace Ebola cases. All the presentations and related videos can be found in the MSF Innovation Channel.

Last year the Keynote by Jeremy Farrar at MSF Scientific Day highlighted the key issue of needing to be able to adapt and be prepared for emergency outbreaks in order to tackle them efficiently. During the talk it was mentioned that communication before and during public health emergencies could be improved by sharing research data, but more importantly sharing the benefits of access to the research data. This is something I think we can all agree on and we have already started to see some improvements with access to data during the current Zika Virus outbreak in South America. All of last year’s posters, slides and videos can be found in the MSF Scientific Day channel, so do check them out.

MSF Scientific Day Poster Competition

Today is also the start of the MSF Scientific Day poster competition and all of the posters are now online for this year’s meeting: https://f1000research.com/channels/msf/sciday-uk2016.

Over the next couple of weeks, the wider community can access the research that will be presented and leave comments on the posters that particularly interest them. Then during the day all the meeting participants will cast their votes on which one they believe should win the prize based upon the perceived interest, relevance, presentation and importance. So please do feel free to take a look at them and let us know your thoughts – the voting form can be found here!

We will also be blogging about some of the content presented at this year’s meeting. So watch this space for coverage of MSF research on urgent medical and humanitarian issues.