The Borderless Plague, a conversation about Ebola and its implications, to take place at The Bram and Bluma Appel Salon in Toronto on February 8th

TORONTO, Jan. 16, 2015 /CNW/ - The Bram and Bluma Appel Salon in the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St., will be the venue for an important conversation looking at Ebola and its implication. The Borderless Plague will take place on Sunday, February 8^th at 1:30 p.m. and will feature Dr. James Orbinski and Dr. James Maskalyk, two of Canada's most respected international health advocates, in conversation with CBC Radio's Carol Off. Tickets are free and available at http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?R=EVT18549

An Officer of the Order of Canada and member of the Order of Ontario, James Orbinski is a humanitarian practitioner and advocate, as well as a leading scholar in global health. He believes in humanitarianism, in citizenship and in actively engaging and shaping the world in which we live, so that it is more humane, fair and just.

As international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) from 1998 to 2001, Dr. Orbinski launched its Access to Essential Medicines Campaign and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to MSF. He led MSF's mission in Kigali, Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, and in 1996 in Goma, Zaire. He served as MSF's medical co-coordinator in Afghanistan in 1993 and in Somalia in 1992-93.

From 2001 to 2004 Dr. Orbinski co-chaired MSF's Neglected Diseases Working Group, which in 2004 launched the not-for-profit Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi). Since then, DNDi has developed and delivered six new treatments and has 17 others in its pipeline for Chagas disease, leishmaniasis and malaria, while building sustainable research capacity in disease-endemic countries.

In 2004, Dr. Orbinski co-founded Dignitas International, which is now supporting nearly 200,000 people on full treatment for HIV and has scaled up a model for providing HIV-related services to more than 3.1 million people in Malawi. Dignitas also has an extensive research capacity focused on improving health systems in the developing world.

Dr. Orbinski has served on the founding boards of the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, the Stephen Lewis Foundation and Canadian Doctors for Medicare. He is a founding member of the editorial boards of Open Medicine and Conflict and Health. Dr. Orbinski is a member of the Climate Change and Health Council and the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Health Care Systems and Cooperation. Some of his formal research is recognized as among the "best science in the world" (in 2006), and as having "shaped scholarship in the field of global health in the post Second World War years".

He is also the author of the award-winning and best-selling book, An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarianism in the 21st Century (Doubleday Canada 2008). The book has since been translated into five languages. He was also the subject of the award-winning 2008 documentary film, Triage: Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma.

James Maskalyk is a physician and author, most notably of the bestselling book Six Months in Sudan. He practices emergency medicine at St. Michael's, Toronto's inner-city hospital and is an award winning teacher at the University of Toronto, an associate and founding editor of the open access medical journal Open Medicine, and director of TAAAC(EM), a  program that works with Ethiopian partners at Addis Ababa University to train East Africa's first emergency physicians.   He has recently returned from working in Ethiopia's largest public ER with front-line workers to address overcrowding, and improve Ebola surveillance and response. 

James is a member of Medecins Sans Frontieres, an organization for which he has worked as both a journalist and a physician, most recently, in Dadaab Kenya, home to the world's largest refugee camp. He was MSF's first official blogger, and is working on his second book, Life on the Ground Floor, due out from Doubleday Canada in 2016.

SOURCE News - Media

or to arrange an interview with the participants, please contact Scott Sellers at [phone] or [email protected].