Professor Štěrba represented Czech oncology at the most important congress in the world
Professor Jaroslav Štěrba, Head of the Department of Paediatric Oncology at the Brno University Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine, represented Czech paediatric oncology at the world's largest professional event.
Four days of cutting-edge science, engaging lectures and debates and world-leading experts in pediatric oncology. This is SIOP - World Congress of Pediatric Oncology, held in Honolulu, Hawaii. Among this year's participants, Professor Jaroslav Štěrba, Head of the Department of Paediatric Oncology at the Brno University Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine, was also a presenter in the Meet the Expert section.
SIOP is the largest and most important global event in the field of paediatric oncology, attended by several thousand people every year. More than six hundred presentations were presented at this year's event, either in the form of lectures or posters, including twenty-three special lectures invited by the Scientific Committee of the International Society for Paediatric Oncology - including Professor Štěrba's.
"Each such invited lecture is a confirmation of the importance of the topic to which this invited speaker has been devoted for a long time, but it is also a great honour for the institute, the lecturer himself, and for his country, because this is an extraordinary recognition of his contribution and importance to the field," says Jaroslav Štěrba. "It is also a confirmation of the quality and importance of Czech medicine, especially its academic part, which still maintains its international credit in many areas, despite the failure of the Czech state as an organizer and also the main payer of health care. The outward manifestation of this failure of regulators, payers and organisers of health care are the desperate acts of unfortunate patients and their families in the form of repeated fundraising events for individual patients, sometimes with very different degrees of rationality."
At the congress he presented the issue of so-called metronomic and off-label treatment in paediatric oncology, i.e. treatment consisting in long-term administration of lower doses of drugs, or the use of drugs in a different way than officially approved. This is a topic that is outside the main focus of the pharmaceutical industry, but has been gaining importance in recent years in both paediatric and adult oncology, and is now an integral part of modern treatment regimens for the most serious diseases, changing the fate of cancer patients. "For more than 20 years, our department in Brno has been one of the leaders in this field in Europe and worldwide," concludes Professor Štěrba.
