MONICA's quarter century.

Abstract

Following the seminal conference in Bethesda, USA in 1978 on the Decline in Coronary Heart Disease Mortality [1], organized by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the Cardiovascular Diseases Unit at the World Health Organization convened a series of meetings of medical researchers to plan a collaborative study of the mechanism of changing trends. These meetings resulted in the World Health Organization MONICA Project (derived from ‘Multinational MONItoring of Trends and Determinants in CArdiovascular disease’) [2]. Twenty-five years later, in late September 2003, the closing act of this global study, held at the World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva, attended by some of its founding fathers, was the launch of an omnibus book, accounting for what MONICA had done in the interim. This MONICA Monograph and Multimedia Sourcebook [3] should appeal to everyone interested in cardiovascular diseases, in risk factors, in primary and secondary prevention and in public health and health policies.