How many unknowns for the coming year. And, even more immediate: how many unknowns for the coming winter. Will we be victims of one or more new variants of SARS CoV-2? Or will the cold season pass quietly with ups and downs of the disease, of course, but without dramatic consequences on our lives? But it was only Covid that troubled us … The Draghi government has left us a series of defined measures to improve territorial health which, in other words, means taking care of ourselves well and close to home without pushing us to clog hospitals, to wander for an emergency room in hunt for someone to explain to us why we feel bad and give us a cure. Will the new government continue on this path? Will it guarantee the chronically ill and the elderly that someone will take care of them with constancy and dedication? Will our beloved and highly advanced SSN keep us? These days many practice making predictions. But what matters is the legacy of the past three years, which changed the world, and changed medicine.
We speak, certainly and with joy, of the new protagonists: starting with his majesty RNA who gave us the vaccines and who is now at the center of biomedical research; as well as innovative therapies brought about by the genetic revolution that are beginning to arrive in large numbers for many diseases and promise to change their natural history. Let’s talk about the new attention to viruses and bacteria: we assumed that they had beaten the retreat in the face of antibiotics, vaccines, prevention strategies; to realize after six million or more deaths that this is just not the case. We are talking about the new watchwords of post-pandemic health care: territory, attention to the chronic and the elderly, faster mechanisms for drug approval, telemedicine. And of the renewed awareness that we must arrive at the inevitable appointment with old age and diseases, even unpredictable as it was Covid, in amazing conditions to be able to fight them. It is our workhorse: medicine for the healthy, that powerful mix of physical activity, good nutrition, early diagnostics, vaccines and prevention that can allow us to age in health, without (or with the minimum possible) disability.
But we also speak, and perhaps above all, of a wind of renewal, of a desire for science, of that science capable of fighting the most serious diseases with extraordinary innovations. This is why we wanted to title our Festival: Salute. The new age. And let’s make an appointment on 20, 21, 22 October: for those who can in Rome (at Ara Pacis); for those not, streaming on our site. We will have over 100 guests, the most authoritative Italian scientists and world stars such as the Nobel laureates Craig Mello, louis ignarro, Michael Houghton, Jim Allson, Giorgio Parisi; the famous ecological physicist Fritjof Capra and the microbiologist Rino Rappuoli. Many personalities of civil society and sport engaged in a new age of health: from Giorgia Soleri a Francesca Schiavoneyes Big Mama a Silvia Salisa Josefa I’m going e Massimo Stano.
What is important to us is to open a new chapter of Italian medicine and healthcare, to put Covid behind us, even if it will come back to haunt us. And to look ahead with the awareness of what our lives need, to be able to ask, ask and ask. In compliance with the Constitution.