BIREME/PAHO/WHO celebrates its 55th anniversary in 2022 and, to mark this important date, which coincides with the year in which PAHO/WHO turns 120, a combined commemorative stamp was created, which is being applied to the graphic materials that will be used by BIREME throughout 2022 in official agendas and correspondence, PowerPoint presentations, email signatures and virtual meeting backgrounds.
The meeting between the BIREME team, which was attended by the Director of the EIH Department of PAHO/WHO and the Interim Director of BIREME, Sebastián Garcia Saisó, and the General Coordinator of Documentation and Information (CGDI), Shirlei Rodrigues, and Sandra Cristina Teixeira, responsible for the Dissemination of Technical-Scientific Information in Health, both linked to the Undersecretariat for Administrative Affairs of the Executive Secretariat of the Ministry of Health (MS in its Brazilian acronym) of Brazil, aimed to report and validate the results programmed and achieved by the Center in the second semester of 2021, in the context of the 6th Adjustment Term to Cooperation Term 95 (TA6/TC95) and to progress activities of the Annual Work Plan (PTA) of the 9th Amendment to the TC95 (TA9/TC95).
Health Information Networks are essential to strengthen and extend the work carried out by BIREME in favor of the VHL, LILACS, DeCS, and all information sources that contribute to the democratization of access and visibility of scientific knowledge in health in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (LA&C). These networks bring together information science professionals from cooperating institutions from all LA&C countries, the United States, Spain, Portugal, Mozambique, and other countries. BIREME, as the regional coordinator of this great Network of Networks, launched on March 9th the 2022 Network Calendar of Meetings.
In order to meet regional needs for indexing and retrieving scientific and technical literature from Latin America and the Caribbean, the DeCS/MeSH thesaurus was created in 1986 as a Portuguese and Spanish version of the terms and thematic categories of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus and expanded with four unique categories: Public Health, Homeopathy, Science and Health, and Health Surveillance. More recently, it is necessary to include a new specific category in the DeCS thesaurus, Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine (TCIM).
In the context of the technical cooperation agreement that marks phase III of the partnership between the Municipal Health Department of São Paulo (SMS – São Paulo) and BIREME/PAHO/WHO, the course on Access and Use of Scientific Information in Health took place in a virtual environment on February 23rd. With a workload of 2h, targeting health and information science professionals from SMS-São Paulo, the course was attended by over 130 professionals.
World Kidney Day 2022 was celebrated on March 10th under the theme “Kidney Health for All”. The campaign encourages research on chronic kidney disease, as the continuous and persistent lack of knowledge about this disease is demonstrable at all levels of health care. In order to make an increasing number of people aware of the disease, PAHO/WHO publishes a guide for the implementation of HEARTS in the Americas. HEARTS was recently recognized with the World Heart Awards by the World Heart Federation in the “Promotion of Cardiovascular Health” category.