Madan Rehani, PhD
President, IOMP

COVID-19 issues, Brachytherapy, medical students’ course and IMPW

Dear Colleagues,

A look at the PubMed on COVID-19 articles on 12 April indicates >4000 articles already published in less than 3 months. Currently, more than 500 papers are getting published every single day. This is a phenomenal amount. While most will agree that we are passing through the most difficult time of our lifetime where new solutions will need to emerge. It appears that the quality and type of life will be different, at least till a vaccine against COVID-19 becomes widely available. Traditionally, humankind has risen to the occasion and has overcome such crisis and that gives us hope. But during this time, we owe debt to a large number of lives whom modern medicine could not save. We encourage all medical physicists in the world to share developments and solutions that can help others. Therefore, we decided to ask some medical physics colleagues from different parts of the world to tell us about their experience. This issue of the newsletter has articles from Australia,  Greece, Brazil, S Korea and S Africa. We have created a COVID-19 page on the IOMP website that provides a number of resources, including resources of our national members and regional organizations. Not to lose track of traditional scientific articles, we always maintain one article on radiation oncology physics and this time we have included one on real-time QA in HDR brachytherapy.

In this issue, we also provide a short report on the medical physics training course for medical students.

Being aware of the current situation, we appreciate interest shown by some in organizing virtual events at the occasion of International Medical Physics Week on 10-15 May 2020. Please use your discretion and local guidelines. IOMP Executive Committee (ExCom) Flyer for IMPW is provided here. IOMP is organizing webinars during IMPW which will be announced next week. Please keep a watch on IMPW webpage.