Friday, April 9, 1999
This rendez-vous is part of our effort to share with Globalink members the outcome of the international meeting that took place in Atlanta (March 24-26) and especially of the working group on "information management".
Thank you Pascal for accepting our "rendez-vous". May I ask you to introduce yourself?
My name is Pascal A. Diethelm.
I am both French and Swiss and have been with WHO for about 27 years (WHO was my first full time job after university).
My current function is Team Coordinator, Networking and Telecommunications.
The team is in particular responsible for managing central information technology (IT) services such as the WHO network, Internet connectivity and the WHO Web site.
Since I joined WHO, I spent half of my career applying my IT and mathematical knowledge in the areas of epidemiology and clinical trials, and the other half in dealing with general IT support to WHO.
I graduated in econometrics from the University of Geneva and I still have an interest for economic questions, even if they fall outside of my main area of work.
In general, all that throws bridges between different disciplines interests me.
I can say that I never smoked. I may have tried a few puffs that easily persuaded me to dismiss smoking as 1) it did not taste good and 2) I found the idea of filling one's lungs with smoke really stupid. Breathing fresh air has always produced on me a voluptuous feeling that I think no artificial stimulant can match. It may have helped a lot that, while still a teenager, I became a passionate mountain climber.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, I gradually developed a sense of anti-smoking advocacy, mainly for two reasons: first, because it caused me pain to see obvious signs that friends and people around me were ruining their health by smoking; second, because I grew more aware of the discomfort and health risks of secondhand smoking.
As an anti-smoking advocate, I follow two tracks.
One track is in my capacity of WHO staff member.
I volunteered a few years ago to develop a computerized system aimed at producing and retrieving country profiles and regional profiles of tobacco consumption.
Since then my interest in helping WHO in its fight against smoking has continued.
I was delighted when Dr Brundtland declared tobacco one of her top priorities, created the Tobacco Free Initiative, and asked Derek Yach to lead it.
In my capacity of Team Leader, Networking and Telecommunications, my role is to provide IT support to the project.
In particular, my team works with Sharon Taylor (of the WHO Library) who is doing a splendid job as information content coordinator for TFI.
The other track is in my personal capacity. As an individual, I lobbied and obtained a couple of years ago that WHO exercise its moral influence on the United Nations Pension Fund to withdraw all their investments in stocks related to the tobacco industry. We were successful, and the UN Pension Fund sold all its Philip Morris stocks.
I am currently working (in collaboration with Ruben Israel) on the creation of a local association, called OxyGeneve, aimed a promoting the fundamental right of all to breathe healthy air, free of tobacco smoke.
The association will also be a test case for organizing local action.
1. Why do you think a structure such as this "Alliance" is needed?
While diversity enriches the anti-tobacco movement, division weakens it.
A structure is needed which can capitalize on the diversity of the different contributors, while removing or reducing artificial obstacles.
The giants of the tobacco industry have always managed to create the illusion of free competition, while secretly preserving everywhere cartel arrangements to secure abnormally high levels of profitability, from which they derive their immense power.
Confronted with such a formidable opponent, the anti-tobacco movement needs to mobilize all its energies on a World-Wide scale and use them to their full potential.
This requires a great deal of coordinating.
In today's information societies, this coordination necessarily implies the coordination of information activities.
My understanding is that this is the fundamental objective of the Alliance.
2. Can you give us one or more concrete examples of what the Alliance could achieve that would have been more difficult or impossible without it?
By maintaining a channel of communication among themselves and co-ordinating their actions, networks of activists, individual advocates, governmental and non-governmental institutions involved in tobacco-control activities, will recognize their respective and complementary roles.
This will help them devise possibilities of cooperation, identify duplication of activities or areas that need to be more fully covered, leading to a better distribution of efforts, and possibly to joint projects.
Uncoordinated activities generally tend to develop in ways that are at best linearly proportional to the efforts invested in them.
A co-ordinated approach may trigger an exponential development pattern.
Once a first level of commonality has been adopted (standard data representation formats, meta-tags, thesaurus, search engines, portal or common site locator, common practices and protocols, etc.) and information and instrument sharing agreements exist among stakeholders, what is done by one will immediately benefit all.
This is the model of development that prevailed for the creation of the Internet.
It is a formidably powerful model, and probably one of the few capable of challenging the tobacco industry.
3. Tobacco control activists have sometimes the reputation to be very opinionated and assertive people, not always easy to get along with.
You belong to a big international institution. How did you feel with them?
One thing is clear: they are not boring.
Activists have the ability to challenge established ideas.
They are also much less constrained in their expression than large governmental institutions.
There are activists with incredible dedication to their ideals, capable of intensively focusing on specific aspects of the issue.
It requires also a lot of courage, as an individual, to stand up to the tobacco industry, often in a socially and politically hostile environment.
Because activists tend to be more visible than average citizens, those who display a particular behaviour are more noticeable, but it remains to be seen whether the proportion of people who are not easy to get along with is higher among activists than in the rest of the population.
4. Was the Internet "connection" an important common ground, as well as the shared commitment to fight tobacco?
The Internet will play a key role in our fight against tobacco.
The restriction on the flow of tobacco-related information and secrecy has over the past decades only benefited the tobacco industry.
The tobacco industry is dominated by multinationals which have very elaborate global strategies.
While successes in one particular country, such as the USA, are crucial for the whole anti-tobacco movement, the war will not be won unless it is won on a global scale.
The Internet will allow the anti-tobacco movement to treat its objectives on a global scale.
The Internet will also help take individual activists in countries out of their isolation and give them the initial encouragement and support they need to build national anti-tobacco movements.
We have no choice: if we want to outsmart the industry, we have to become masters in the use of the Internet.
5. So what? What's next?
We took some concrete decisions that can be implemented without delay.
First, we need to establish a discussion list to keep the dialogue alive (action:
Globalink?) and continue the momentum reached in Atlanta.
We need to expand our terms of reference and write our bylaws.
We need to inform those who were not able to attend the Atlanta meeting.
We can also work on the common site locator (portal) and start looking into a search engine.
Some can start to investigate the common data exchange instruments, and look into XML (for a good tutorial on XML, with reference to a concrete application (patient records) see PDF file xmltutorial-w99.pdf at the following address:
http://www.mcis.duke.edu/standards/hl7/committees/sgml/#presentations/)
What you feel like adding:
The war for a tobacco free world can be won only if we unite our forces.
We must fight on all fronts, we must use all available means at our disposal, and we must do it together.
Thank you Pascal for taking the time to be with us today.
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