Sixteen Countries Attend International Conference on Traditional Medicines in Delhi

The two-day International Conference - ICoSDiTAUS-2020 on Standardization of Diagnosis and Terminologies in Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha Systems of Medicine concluded on 26th February 2020 in New Delhi with adopting the “New Delhi Declaration on Collection & Classification of Traditional Medicine (TM) Diagnostic Data”.

Sixteen countries which came together for the cause of Traditional Medicine at this conference included Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Serbia, Curacao, Cuba, Myanmar, Equatorial Guinea, Qatar, Ghana, Bhutan, Uzbekistan, India, Switzerland, Iran, Jamaica and Japan.

ICoSDiTAUS-2020 is the biggest ever international event dedicated to standardization of Diagnosis and Terminologies of Traditional Medicine in terms of the broad level of participation covering virtually all the continents.

The inaugural address of Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director, WHO - SEARO on 25th February 2020 set the tone for the conference, and underlined the power of TM systems and their significance in addressing the public health challenges of the 21st century.  Dr Samira Asma, Assistant Director General, WHO, joined in through video conference, emphasized on the potential of strategic use of data and evidence to advance TM systems into public health. Dr. Rajesh Kotecha, Secretary, AYUSH, in his talk in the inaugural session explained the extent of the contribution being made in Traditional Medicine systems in India in the effort to achieve universal health coverage.

The topics discussed in the conference included:

The challenges in Counting and classification of traditional medicine encounters.

Adapting ICD to TM Systems and their implementation.

Relevance and regulation of Traditional Medicine in Health Systems.

TM data and digital health, in which the global picture was presented by Prof Kenji Watanabe of Japan, a leading proponent of adoption of TM in public health, and country perspectives were given by different participants.