Newsletters

Newsletter December 2020

Dear Global Asthma Network colleagues and friends,

At the time of our last GAN newsletter in March, in most of the world the full impact of COVID-19 was not foreseen and was yet to be felt, with its acute and long lasting devastating effects that have affected so many people, and still do. This is an unprecedented event that has changed our lives in many ways. Our compassion to all those affected.

GAN Phase I data collection, data and methodology checks have been completed, and we are impressed by your work. Analyses and paper writing is now starting (see 4 new publications on page 7), and if your data is included in a paper you will be a named author in the study group. Only centres which met the main methodology requirements can be included in the papers. Centres who were unable to meet the data submission deadline for inclusion in the first papers, will be included in GAR 2022. Unfortunately, in some centres school closures this year have halted and derailed your GAN Phase I data collection, resulting in insufficient responses to be able to be included in our analyses.

We again request that our collaborators send photos for the GAR 2022. The specifications for photographs are included on page 8 in this newsletter and we encourage you to send these to us so that we have a vibrant new set of high-quality photos to include.

The Steering Group was of course unable to travel for our yearly Steering Group meeting at the Union World Conference on Lung Health originally scheduled in Seville, Spain. Instead we held 2 hourly Zoom meetings over 4 days. We were able to attend to the agenda items and discuss GAN Phase I data analysis, future GAN publications and development of the GAR 2022.

We encourage you to send any GAN related publications to us so that Eamon Ellwood can put these up on the GAN websitehttp://www.globalasthmanetwork.org/publications/publications.php

The GAN COVID-19 survey has been circulated to interested collaborators from 50 GAN centres in 35 Countries. Eamon has completed the online data entry programme and this will be circulated to the participating centres before Christmas.

I am delighted to congratulate Guy Marks and Arzu Yorgancıoğlu (pages 2 and 3) and to welcome to the GAN Steering Group, Eva Morales, Refiloe Masekela and Eamon Ellwood (profiled on pages 4, 5 and 6).

We acknowledge the hard work you have all put in to ensuring the success of GAN, especially in these difficult times. We thank you all, and we wish you a happy Christmas and festive season.

With all best wishes from the GAN Global Centre.

Innes
Professor Innes Asher ONZM
Chair of GAN

Please click on the pdf link above to view the complete newsletter.