The Alcohol Research Group (ARG) is proposing an international conference, """"""""Alcohol and Injury: New Knowledge from ER Studies,"""""""" to be held at the DoubleTree conference hotel in Berkeley, California, October 3 - 6, 2005. The conference will be co-sponsored by WHO and CDC who will provide support for their official representatives to attend and participate in the conference. Invited participants represent 21 countries and include, among others, collaborators from the Emergency Room Collaborative Alcohol Analysis Project (ERCAAP) funded under ARG's Center grant and investigators from the WHO Collaborative Study on Alcohol and Injuries, all of whom have participated in conducting ER studies of alcohol and injuries. The goals of the conference are to: 1) promote a scientific exchange of current findings, developments and key issues in the field of alcohol and injury from ER studies; 2) identify limitations and gaps in this research; 3) discuss and promote translation of research findings into practice; 4) discuss public health policy implications of the research, and recommendations and funding priorities for future research in this field; 5} discuss and plan future collaborative projects; and, 6} produce as one outcome of the conference, a book compiling selected conference presentations and other seminal work in the field. Topics to be covered include: 1) research literature, key issues and developments in field of alcohol and injury over the last 20 years; 2) findings from ER studies across a number of countries, including recent collaborative work; 3) the influence of contextual variables related to the organization of ER services delivery and socio-cultural variables on associations of alcohol and injury across sites, studies and countries; 4) affects of acute alcohol vs. chronic use on risk of injury and attributable risk; 5) methodologies for analyzing ER data across cultures, including meta-analysis, HLM modeling, and case cross-over techniques; 6) methods for identifying alcohol-related injury; 7) usefulness of ER data for surveillance; 8) quality and limitations of data from ER studies and gaps in this research; 9) public health policy implications of findings from ER studies and recommendations; 10) translation of ER findings into practice;11) research implications for future ER studies and funding priorities, and;12) collaborative research plans for future work. The conference will provide a venue for scientists to strengthen existing collaborative relationships and to establish new collaborations requisite for future research on alcohol and injury. This will be the first conference on the epidemiology of alcohol and injury in the ER of this magnitude in the last 20 years, and follows on recommendations for directions for future research on alcohol and injury presented to the NIAAA Extramural Scientific Advisory Board Meeting on Epidemiology.
