ISTM News
ISTM Secretary/Treasurer's Financial Report
I am pleased to report on our current financial status.
An audited financial report for the fiscal year 2006 (July 1, 2005-June 30, 2006) will be available to members at the Membership Assembly in Vancouver. The report was prepared by our outside accountant, Heritage Accounting. ISTM officially began this new fiscal year structure in July 1, 2005. This new structure allows robust budgeting and allocation in coordination with the annual Executive Board meeting, which occurs each year in May or June. A budget for the 2007-8 fiscal year will be passed by the Executive Board in Vancouver. For the current 2006-7 year, ISTM is on budget.
As of the end of February 2007, our total assets, including reserves, stand at $1.25 million dollars, down about $125K from a year earlier. This is representative of our typical 4-year cycle: an increase in receipt of revenues from our previous biennial meeting (Lisbon, 2005); our current upfront investment in Vancouver; but prior to realizing any revenue generated by the 2007 Vancouver meeting. North American meetings tend to earn less revenue for ISTM than European meetings. Therefore, we have increased reserves over the past two years to minimize fluctuations in supporting programs that are ongoing.
Our publishing contract with our new publisher (Blackwell) began January 1, 2006. This contract gives ISTM much more favorable terms than past contracts and has ended the large subsidies that ISTM had to provide to our Journal (Journal of Travel Medicine). The money saved will provide funding for future ISTM initiatives. Nevertheless, the Journal remains a small net expense for ISTM. We are hoping this expense will soon be a small net surplus as a result of continuing increases in revenues from advertising, reprints, and journal supplements.
Our investments are with RBC Dain Rauscher, the 10th largest investment firm in the US and a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada, one of the world's largest financial firms. The ISTM Finance Committee has recently made the decision to hold up to 25% of our long-term reserves in conservative fixed-income Euro investments in order to represent the global nature of our membership and to safeguard against further deterioration in the US dollar. This may also help us in the future in terms of necessary advances for CISTMs in Europe, as these must be paid in Euros.
On the administrative side I am pleased to report the following:
- Membership has surpassed 2,000.
- The ISTM administration will be moving to its own leased office space in July 2007. The offices will house our two administrative staff, who will now become salaried employees. Until now they have been working as outside contractors. This will increase efficiency.
- ISTM held its first Internet-based Executive Board election this year and a record 30% of the membership cast ballots.
- Registration for the CISTM and for ISTM courses has been moved in-house, onto our web-based administrative system.
- The ISTM secretariat has overseen the growth of the TravelMed listserv to over 1,000 member-subscribers and has spent increasing time monitoring and enforcing orderliness and etiquette amongst subscribers, a sometimes delicate task. (We owe Brooke Gouge much appreciation for doing this.) A state-of-the-art web-based search utility is now available to sift through the wisdom accumulated over 11 years and 15,000 postings on TravelMed.
It is a privilege to serve as your Secretary-Treasurer and I look forward to hearing from any member at istm@istm.org with any concerns or questions.
David O. Freedman, MD
Secretary/Treasurer
ISTM
Certificate in Travel Health Examination Committee
The CTH examination is being administered in Vancouver just prior to the opening of the Conference. There are over 470 examinees from many countries taking the examination. A survey done previously suggested that people are very satisfied with the credential in that it has established a recognized standard of knowledge for travel medicine. Prior examinees have also felt that it encouraged their professional development and enhanced their status in the travel medicine community.
Efforts are ongoing to try to make the exam more accessible to those who have communicated difficulty in attending the biennial conference sites.
Please feel free to access the list of Exam Committee members on the ISTM web site and contact them with suggestions or queries about the exam and CTH.
Thank you for your support,
Phyllis Kozarsky,
Chairperson, on behalf of the CTH Examination Committee
Travel Industry and Public Education Committee (TIPEC)
The TIPEC committee has decided this year to focus on providing tools to ISTM members to use for direct liaison with their local media and travel industry members. This decision has been as a result of disappointing past attempts to work with the travel industry at a higher level (i.e., society to society). In some countries travel medicine groups have managed to forge a strong and positive relationship with the travel industry, however, this is proving difficult in many other countries. Thus we have decided to work at a grass roots level and over time will build a toolbox of ideas and practical items that ISTM members can access via our Society website. The first of these is a series of ten short articles written by a professional travel/medical writer on common travel health topics. The concept is that ISTM members can access these articles and submit them to their local media - thus providing public education on issues relating to travel health as well as publicity for the particular clinic providing the information. We have a number of other ideas but are particularly interested in getting feedback from ISTM members as to what they think would be useful to them, and ways we can help them approach the travel industry. To this end we plan to hold a meeting in Vancouver and we urge as many interested members as possible to attend. If for some reason this cannot be organised, we will conduct a survey via the listserv later in the year. From all accounts this has been a frustrating committee to work on for many years but we are all optimists and hope we can help at least some ISTM members increase their profiles with both their local travelling public and travel industry members.
Trish Batchelor,
TIPEC Chairperson
Refugee and Migrant Health Committee
The Committee remains actively engaged in the travel medicine issues related to migrants and mobile populations. A consensus paper on travel to visit friends and relatives (VFR) remains under development. In a recent issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Committee members provided commentary on a previously published study of VFR travel.
Committee members have also prepared material on the same topic for the WHO publication, International Travel and Health. Also underway at this time are preliminary efforts to develop an international research proposal involving Committee members in Europe and North America. On the Agenda for CISTM 10 in Vancouver is the selection of a new Committee Chairperson.
Brian Gushulak,
Chairperson
