Time to refresh professional meetings between colleagues

Abstract

Arctic health professionals will meet in Nuuk, Greenland, in September of this year. The meeting will be a rich source for new ideas and an opportunity to refresh, or bind new international linkages between colleagues. I hope many of us will have the opportunity to be present. Also Antarctic health researches had a successful meeting with I50 participants in Plymouth, UK in May. Abstracts from this event will be published as a supplement in this journal. In this issue, we have two rare views of the arctic environment; one concerning contaminants in indoor environments and another on cold work environments of dairy farms. Both reports also offer useful information for health care practitioners. Similarly useful is the article describing the associations between life in cold environments and obstructive respiratory diseases and symptoms at the population level. Finally, the articles concerned with cold in this issue are concluded with a method development report describing how, in practice, to manage health and safety risks related to cold in workplaces. Stress due to modernization of indigenous populations in Siberia and health culture in northern Finland describes interestingly relationships between health and Arctic societies today.