News Release

20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: Celebrating today's Germany

Peer-Reviewed Publication

The Lancet_DELETED

The lead Editorial in this week's Lancet examines the progress made in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Editorial says it is encouraging that differences in social determinants of health have all but disappeared between the old East and West regions, with women in both area enjoying the same life expectancy and men from the East having life expectancy just one year less than those from the West.

Two other anniversaries are being celebrated in Germany soon. It is 300 years since the foundation of the Charité and 200 years since that of the Humboldt University itself, which is Berlin's oldest university. Both these institutions were crucial to Germany's golden age of scientific discovery and medical, educational, and philosophical leadership in the 19th century.

The Editorial highlights that both institutions have seen two periods of intellectual and humanitarian darkness, in which the whole edifice of free thinking, innovation, and medical advances for the good of humankind was not only abused and dismantled but also severely tainted for future decades. The Editorial points out that, while the roles of Nazi Germany and doctors and scientists of that era have been explored in depth, the more recent past under the rule of East Germany's Socialist Unity Party, has been largely ignored. The Charité has finally started to address these more recent times in communist East Germany with an exhibition entitled "The long silence of the Charité".

More reforms are needed for more women to be allowed to take up leading roles in the academic centres of new federal states. While acknowledging the country is playing catch up, the Editorial says: "It is good to see that Germany is starting to emerge from a time of introspection to one of international engagement."

It concludes: "With the idea of the World Health Summit in 2009 and its continued commitment this year and for future summits, the Charité has taken an important and welcome step. It has started to reassert itself in global health affairs. Public health, which was abandoned after World War 2 as a discipline in Germany and was only slowly reinstated with a largely national focus in the 1990s, needs to once again take its place in leading international efforts to combat and prevent diseases on a global scale. Virchow would have expected nothing less."

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The Lancet Press Office T) +44 (0) 20 7424 4949 E) tony.kirby@lancet.com

For full Editorial see: http://press.thelancet.com/editorials0910.pdf


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