Healthy Lungs for Life campaign: a festival of lung health for the ERS International Congress, Munich and the globe

Abstract

The European Respiratory Society (ERS) will hold its annual International Congress this year in Munich, Germany. The ERS congress has been growing and evolving over the last 10 years, with attendance soaring to a steady 20 000. The congress is home to all stakeholders in respiratory medicine including researchers, clinicians, allied professionals and industy. More recently, working together with the European Lung Foundation (ELF), patients and policy makers have started to attend the congress and play a key role in discussions and activities. Each year the ERS congress is becoming more diverse and more relevant to all key players in the field, but clearly it has limitations as in order to attend the congress people have to travel, which is not always possible. With this in mind, in 2014, we want to make sure that the ERS congress, and all of us who take part in it, will have a bigger impact than previously realised, not just on those attending the ERS congress, but to a truly global audience. Figures from the latest edition of the European Lung White Book [1] give the startling message that one in eight Europeans currently die from a lung condition. Lung diseases, over the past two decades, have been a globally important cause of death and disability, and are set to remain as such. However the nature of lung …