Victor Hinov, MD - the Family Practice resident and the Secretary of the Indi-RAMA from Indianapolis, IN and I went to Washington, DC on Monday, the 2nd of May to participate in the 20th World Russian Forum and to meet with the group of Russian doctors from Washington, Bethesda and Alexandria who are helping us to organize the 3rd National Conference.

We stayed at the house of Drs. Lyuba Vartikovski and Irwin Arias in Bethesda, MD. Both of them work at the NIH/NCI – Lyuba is a Senior Physician and the Adjunct Scientist at the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis and Irwin is a Head of the Laboratory of Liver Biochemistry at the NIH and main author of the most important texts published on this subject.

On Monday evening we had dinner at Lyuba’s house and met with Irina Feldman, MD - endocrinologist from the Suburban Hospital, Alex Osinovsky, DDS – dentist from of Vienna, VA and Mikhael Airumian, MD from the Department of Health and Human Services.

They started working with us on prepearing the Conference in October. We had a very productive discussion and it was nice to meet so many smart and interested people who think alike. Wonderful people, great dinner and a beautiful house.

Tuesday, the 3rd of May was also busy. In the morning Victor and I went to the Suburban Hospital to meet with Eugene Passamani, MD – the Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs. We discussed the conference and toured the hospital, and now have support of the hospital administration in organization of the October meeting.

We met Rada Sumareva, DDS – the President and Dimitry Shtilman, DDS – the Director of Foreign Relations of the Russian American Dental Association at their hotel on Embassy Row and together went to meet with the Director of the National Center for Biodefense at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA – Ken Alibek, MD, PhD. Dr. Alibek is very interested in helping us with the preparations for the Conference. Many of his stuff members are from Russia and will be participating in the Conference also. We talked about organizing a small group section on New Emerging Diseases and Prevention. All of it promises to be very interesting.

The Reception at the Russian Embassy was the beginning of the World Russian Forum and was a culmination of the day. More than 200 guests – Russian and American politicians, businessmen, doctors, economists, scientists and artists came to meet each other.