Prof. Waldemar Banasiak, cardiologist and President Elect of the Polish Cardiac Society, talks to Barbara Deręgowska about the society's 11th International Congress in Wrocław.

More than 6,000 cardiologists from Poland and abroad recently gathered in Wrocław for a three-day congress. As the main organizer, how would you sum up the event?
I hope we succeeded in making the congress an important medical event. The idea was that it become a genuine source of knowledge for cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and other physicians, scientists carrying out basic research, public health specialists, nurses and technicians. The advances in diagnosing and treating circulatory diseases are so rapid that physicians have to keep abreast of the latest scientific developments and quickly put them into practice.

Pharmaceutical companies organized a lot of scientific, educational and other symposia as part of the congress. These provided participants with an excellent opportunity to learn from other centers specializing in cardiology and cardiac surgery in Poland and abroad.

The congress ended with a special symposium delivered by the board of the Polish Cardiac Society under the banner: Know Your Enemy: Tobacco. Prof. Marian Zembala, head of the Silesian Center for Heart Disease, Department of Cardiac Surgery and Transplantology, broached the controversial topic of whether physicians have the right to deny treatment to smokers...
Smoking is a chronic illness caused by nicotine addiction and can be compared with heroine or cocaine addiction. Smoking contributes to hardening of the arteries and the formation of blood clots. Tobacco-related illnesses will be responsible for 1 billion deaths worldwide this century, half of them aged between 35 and 70. Smokers reduce their life expectancy by 20 years. Treating tobacco-related illnesses costs Poland around zl.8 billion annually while revenue from excises on tobacco products only comes to zl.6 billion. Prof. Zembala is not alone in wondering how to force people to quit smoking so that treating them is not a waste of time.


Prof. Waldemar Banasiak, 51, graduated from the Military Medical University of Łódź in 1981. He received his post-doctoral degree at the age of 36 and became a professor at 43. He specializes in a type of irregular heart beat illness known as atrial fibrillation as well as stable coronary disease. In 1995, he was appointed head of the Cardiology Clinic at the 4th Military Clinical Hospital in Wrocław where he founded the Heart Disease Center he now heads. Banasiak has been a member of the European Society of Cardiology for the past three years and was selected as President Elect of the Polish Cardiac Society at their General Assembly held Sept. 20. Banasiak is married, with two children.