China

The Smile Train International Cleft Lip and Palate Symposium
The Smile Train sponsored the first International Smile Train Cleft Lip and Palate Symposium at the Beijing International Convention Center on March 2-4, 2000. The conference provided a comprehensive look at cleft lip and palate treatment with a focus on the team approach to clefts.

Forty-first President George Bush kicked off the conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. This exciting symposium brought together a world-renowned faculty of East and West leaders in cleft care. The international meeting drew 1,149 Chinese plastic and oral maxillofacial surgeons from 485 hospitals located in all provinces and autonomous regions of China. Among the participants were representatives from eleven of China's national minority groups.

The co-chairmen for the symposium were Dr. Joseph McCarthy of New York University Medical Center and Dr. Ruyao Song of the Plastic Surgery Hospital in Beijing. There were top leaders in the field presenting the latest in multi-disciplinary approaches to clefts, ranging from state of the art techniques on the surgical repair of clefts to the post-genomic era of cleft lip and palate research, pre-surgical orthopedics, and cleft palate speech evaluation and therapy.