HISTORY OF DIABETES EPIDEMIOLOGY TRAINING COURSE
The First Diabetes Epidemiology Training Course was held in Cambridge, UK, in 1981 by a group of world-renowned epidemiologists including those from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US National Institute of Health (NIH). Since then, this course has been organized annually to train young scientists from all over the world in epidemiological methodologies and to promote collaborative research amongst the participants and the faculty members. Many of the current researchers in diabetes epidemiology have been students from this Cambridge course.
In 1991, the 1st Japan-US Diabetes Epidemiology Training Course was held in Japan at the Jichi Medical School as an educational component of WHO multinational project for childhood diabetes “Diabetes Mondiale(DIAMOND)’ Dr. Takeshi Kuzuya, Dr. Yasunori Kanazawa and Dr. Naoko Tajima were primarily responsible for the organization and conduct of this first course. Twenty-seven young clinicians and researchers from 12 countries that weremainly in the Asia Pacific region were the participants of this first course. One of the main themes of the course was to promote the WHO-DIAMOND Project in documenting the world-wide incidence of Type 1 diabetes. Some of the students of the first course have become co-investigators of the DIAMOND project while many others initiated their own research programs to examine the epidemiology of diabetes in their own countries.
The second course was held in Hawaii in 1995 organized by Dr BL Rodriguez and the third in Korea in 1998. The latter course was led by Dr HK Lee and Dr NH Cho under the auspices of the WHO, US-NIH, Japan Diabetes Foundation and Korean Diabetes Association. In view of the large number of Asian countries represented in this course, it was designated the 1st Asia-Pacific Diabetes Epidemiology Course (APDEC).
The 2nd Asia-Pacific Diabetes Epidemiology Course was held in Hong Kong in October 2001 and was hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong under the chairmanship of Dr. Clive Cockram and Dr. Juliana Chan. The 3rd Asia-Pacific Diabetes Epidemiology Course was held in Sydney, Australia in December 2004 and was hosted by the Australian Centre for Diabetes Strategies and the University of New South Wales under the chairmanship of Dr. Stephen Colagiuri.