 Welcome to London and welcome to the 2017 Scientific Days. My name is Ciaran Joban Putra. I'm the interim head of the Manson Unit based here in MSF UK. And I'm actually not going to give the welcome. I'm about to introduce our general director Vicki Hawkins, but just before she steps up on stage a couple of points of housekeeping, we run really to time. So sometimes it may seem that I'm being a little bit aggressive in my calls for everyone to come back in and sit down, but it's a packed day and it works better that way. There are fire exits if needed. You can actually use these doors here. If the fire alarm rings, please keep seated until an announcement comes over the PA system. And then if it says evacuate, the assembly point is chapel place. So you come out of the building, turn left and go to the end of the street and there will be people milling around there. Now this is an international event. It's being broadcast online live. Last year, the events were watched in 125 countries with 11,000 viewers. So already this morning we have viewers joining from quite a number of places. So I'd like to say good morning to them. We have people joining from the US, India, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, Jordan, Sweden, Germany, Belarus and South Africa. So welcome to that online audience. They will be joining in throughout the day, asking questions and we have people here who will receive their questions and direct them to the chairs. You can also, if you know how to do this, join in using Twitter with the... I need to get this right, the hashtag MSFSI for those of you that are well versed in doing that sort of thing. And there's the comments box on the live stream page as well. There is live French translation, so that can be accessed online. If anyone needs that here, please speak to one of the organisers and that can be arranged. And then finally, just to say that this is a start in a series of events. Tomorrow is the... Today is focusses on medical research, tomorrow on medical innovation. And then there's the South... Those are both here in London and then there's the South Asia Day on May 27th and online and the Southern Africa Day, which is in Malawi on June the 22nd. I'd now like to introduce Vicky Hawkins, the General Director of MSF UK, to give the welcome message. OK, so welcome from me as well to the 2017 MSF Scientific Day. As Ciaran just said, I'm Vicky Hawkins, the General Director of MSF here in the UK. I'm so pleased that these days continue to be so international with not only this huge online audience that always tune in, but the events in India and Malawi that Ciaran has just announced happening over the next year. Two months and really exciting. We've just had it confirmed that South America will join later in the year for their first ever MSF Scientific Day, which will be hosted by the University of Rosario in Argentina. We have a fascinating and stimulating two days ahead, which I really hope will demonstrate the improvements that we're constantly striving to make to the provision of care to patients suffering the impacts of humanitarian medical crisis. We want to share where we succeed and we want to share with you where we fail with the aim that we all improve. And whilst this is a very real responsibility upon us to constantly strive to improve in this way, I've been really reminded over the last few days of the acute limitations to what we can all do. I've just returned from Libya, where I went to see our work in some of the many detention centres where refugees and migrants are being held. Some of them are there for shorter periods, but I talked to detainees who had been in a centre for over a year. Some of them were on their way to Europe. Others had been living and working in Libya for many years and no intention of trying to come here. The conditions that they have to endure in those centres are horrendous. But even worse than the conditions they face is the complete lack of information and due process. They have no access to lawyers or other forms of representation. It really feels like there's absolutely nobody who's listening to their case. The International Organisation of Migrations state that there are 32 of these centres across the country. But in reality the numbers are very fluid and there are centres opening and closing all of the time. IOM figures again state that up to 20,000 people are being held for undetermined periods. Their only option is when their government is ready for them to return to their country of origin. And that's really regardless of what caused them to leave that country in the first place. The treatment they have received should qualify them for international protection. MSF is providing primary health care, some improvements to the water and sanitation situation and emergency referrals. And really importantly we spend time talking to people. But the confines of what we can do there are so stark. We can nominally improve conditions but what people need most of all is not access to a doctor or a friendly face. But to a legal and political system that can get them out of there. What we can do as well is to expose the government migration policies of containment and deterrents that are causing this very suffering in the first place. The EU and its member states they have a right to manage migration. But just as when they wage war they have a responsibility to do so in a way that minimizes human suffering. Migration policies at present they seem designed to do exactly the opposite. We confronted just as often by the harmful impact that government policies have on global health. Outbreaks that are frequently met with political denial. We know too well what happened with the Tadi declaration of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Less well known is that exactly the same happened within a year in Angola with yellow fever. These denials they result in delays to response and they cost lives. The painfully slow process of rolling out new vaccines and medicines such as for pneumonia or hepatitis C are striking examples of where government policies and industry practice operate in direct contradiction to the goal of improving access to these life-saving prophylaxis. As a humanitarian organization we create mechanisms to circumvent the limitations to access. We launch patent oppositions and we increasingly are investing our own efforts and donor resources into research and developments. But what is really needed is for governments to undertake a fundamental design of the R&D architecture to curb its excesses and to force it to work in the interests of patients rather than to profit from them. Against this rather bleak backdrop we mustn't lose sight of the fact that we have made gains. Lives continue to be saved in the midst of humanitarian crisis on a daily basis and the research that we're going to hear about today it contributes to that. Numbers on HIV treatment have been massively scaled up, vaccine coverage is significantly higher, new regimens for MDRTB treatment are available. We've even just seen a timely declaration of an Ebola outbreak and new vaccines are ready to be deployed if necessary. But how much more could we gain if governments, rather than concentrating on a narrowly defined national interest, were instead to put people at the very centre of their policies. I wish you all a very enjoyable and lively day.