In light of the theme Public Health and Human Rights, we have an invited session on the historical issues of Hansen's Disease (leprosy), and an entire poster session # 3078.5 on Monday, Nov. 6 at 10:30 devoted to this issue. The poster session will be portions of the exhibit from the New England Public Health Museum temporarily moved to the APHA Annual Meeting. I hope all our Section members will get a chance to visit this unusual exhibit.

This year we have more sessions than ever before. Our final tallies are: 60 sessions total; 10 poster sessions; and 50 oral sessions. The oral session include five round tables, 15 invited sessions (two are AHPA sessions) and 30 contributed scientific sessions.

We continue to have many sessions on Methodological Techniques and Tools Utilized in Health Care Planning, Policy Development and Evaluation. More and more of these sessions include the new technologies of mapping and the use of Internet tools. There are sessions addressing all the issues of accessing care, whether it is a matter of disparities due to race, ethnicity, language, insurance or economics. We will have sessions on partnerships, nutrition and chronic diseases. This year in addition to our usual topics, there are many sessions addressing the issues of disasters. Some sessions look back on how past disasters were handled, and others address the need to prepare for and meet the needs of disasters due to natural causes (hurricanes, floods), or bioterrorism and pandemics.

Of special interest to some of our section members may be the session # 3301 on Monday, Nov. 6, at 2:30 p.m. titled Providing Insurance and Removing Barriers to Health Care for the Uninsured. There is an abstract by Michael Doonan on the new health care law in Massachusetts. He worked on drafting it and seeing it through the legislature. John McDonough will be speaking at the closing session on this law as well. Many thanks to all the Section members who helped in putting this program together.