Conference to tackle health measures during Haj

The Second World Congress on Mass-Gathering Medicine will be held in Riyadh on Sept. 21, the Ministry of Health (MoH) announced on Sunday.
Dr. Ziad Al-Memish, MOH undersecretary to Public Health, said that the three-day event will be held under the patronage of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and also thanked the Saudi leadership and Health Minister Dr. Abdullah Al- Rabeeah for giving their fullest cooperation in this effort.
Al-Rabeeah has appointed a high-powered committee headed by Al-Memish to make organizational arrangements for the event. It has several sub-committees headed by heads of departments. The conference is expected to be attended by the secretary general of the Arab League, the GCC secretary general, the director-general of the World Health Organization and the regional director of the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Office in Alexandria.
Other attendees will include health ministers from the United States, France, Cuba, Canada, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia and South Korea.
Al-Memish said that the conference aims to study ways and means to enhance the effectiveness of health measures taken to deal with mass gatherings during the Umrah and Haj seasons.
The Kingdom, he said, will be in a position to project its experience in handling mass gatherings. “International experts could enlighten us more on our experiences for the benefit of the other participating countries,” he noted.
The first conference on the impact of mass gatherings on public health was held in Jeddah in 2010 under the patronage of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah.
It was attended by more than 500 experts and 30 speakers and specialists from all over the world. It was decided to establish a Kingdom-based international referential entity specialized in mass-gathering medicine. Such an entity is to be tasked with the classification and definition of the concepts, tasks and activities of mass health.
It shall also be responsible for spreading the culture, programs and regulations of mass-gathering health, all of which based on the premises and output of the considerable, fact-based researches.
The conference adopted the Jeddah Declaration on mass-gathering health, the first regional and global declaration emphasizing the importance of providing holistic and health care services to beneficiaries. The most tangible outcome of the conference were the strategies and benefits gleaned for upgrading mass-gathering medicine worldwide, Al-Memish said, emphasizing the need to establish an international reference authority for mass-gathering medicine, which would preferably be based in the Kingdom.
This authority would be commissioned with several tasks, such as classifying and defining tasks and missions of mass-gathering health, developing mass-gathering health culture, developing programs and systems based on the coordinates and outputs of potential and established research, conducting in-depth analytical studies on aspects of mass-gathering health and creating a database to study and monitor the present situation to assess the extent of progress achieved in embedding this concept.
“The recommendations also called for feedback and futuristic studies, adopting measures to redress health systems on the national, regional and international levels, providing consultations and advice to various countries to develop mass-gathering health plans and programs and exchanging successful experiences in the area of mass-gathering health in cooperation with international agencies and organizations,” Al-Memish said.
It also called for developing plans to develop health awareness and information to educate people about mass gatherings during and after the event.
Many experts emphasized the need to involve civil society and those involved in mass gatherings, such as pilgrims and Haj guides, in health education awareness programs.
Al-Memish urged the WHO to adopt the creation of a specialized awareness program on mass-gathering health.