If the publishers of the Journal live up to their promises, then you should be reading our final Newsletter for 2004 before we reach the end of the year. On behalf of the Council, and the Association, therefore, we take this opportunity to wish all readers of the Journal a Merry Christmas, and a happy, successful, and peaceful New Year. As 2004 comes to its end, of course, we will be confronted by the New Year, and hopefully by new challenges. Perhaps the most exciting innovation involving both the Association and the Journal is that, beginning in January, ordinary, corresponding, and junior members of the Association will regularly receive copies of “Cardiology in the Young” as part of their subscription. For this, of course, as agreed at the Business Meeting in Munich, they will also pay the new annual membership fee of 150 euros. Our Treasurer hopes that the new arrangements for payment of the increased subscriptions are already in place. The collaboration between ourselves and the Editors and publishers of the Journal offers us exciting prospects. We hope that all of our members will take the opportunity to publish their worthwhile and exciting results in the pages of “Cardiology in the Young”. Only by publishing work of the highest standard will the Journal be able to increase its impact factor. We are sure that there is much work being carried out in Europe that is ripe for publication. The Association is well represented on the Editorial Board of the Journal, and it is now very much in our own interests to see the Journal continue to thrive and expand.

We also take this opportunity of reminding all readers of the Journal that the council of the Association has encouraged an active search for new members. We will gain force and recognition in Europe only by increasing our number of members. This will permit us to take a more active political stance in promoting the interests of those involved in the practice of Paediatric Cardiology. Our strength within Europe also carries added value for those involved worldwide in the diagnosis and care of young patients with cardiac disease. There are many challenging issues that need to be discussed in Brussels, but also with representatives of each national government. Our Association is also, perhaps, the best organized of the Continental groups concerned with heart disease in the young, and we believe that we gain added strength from our togetherness. We are reminded of the old aphorism “United we will be strong and we will win, but dispersed and in dispute, we will fail!”

As we look forward to the new academic year, we remind you that the organization for our fortieth annual meeting is well advanced. This year, the meeting will take place in Copenhagen from 18 through 21 May. Joes Ramsoe Jacobsen, along with Gudrun Bjoerkhem, have their organizing committee in place, and are looking forward to welcome you to Copenhagen and Lund. They are using all their forces for organizing an interesting scientific meeting, and are able to guarantee the expected excellence of the social “get-together”. The topics chosen for emphasis this year are the genetics and molecular biology of cardiac disease in childhood, cardiac arrhythmias, interventional treatment, cardiac transplantation, hypoplasia of the left heart, coronary arteries, and valvar replacement in children. These topics should satisfy most, if not all of our potential attendees. We hope you will join them in great numbers, and contribute to the meeting with your scientific contributions. We remind, and encourage, you to submit abstracts, but this must be completed not later than the 10th of January 2005. Abstracts must be submitted in electronic mode. Details are available on the congress website at www.aepc2005.dk. There are reduced fees for those who register very early, and fees are also reduced for our junior members. In your own interest, therefore, we suggest that you to take advantage of this possibility.

At its latest meeting, the council was particularly gratified to be informed of the great generosity of Desmond Duff, who had organized the annual meeting of the Association held in Dublin in 1998. Those who attended the meeting will remember it as very rewarding scientifically, but also a superb social event, with visits to several very early historical sites. We are now delighted to know that Desmond was also able to make a remarkable profit on the meeting, and this without any financial support from the Association. Desmond has now transferred these savings to the account of our society in Geneva, and on your behalf, we thank him most sincerely.

At the same meeting, the Council was sorry to hear that 5 of our members had passed away over the last 18 months. We were particularly sorry to hear of the death of Alain Choussat, a previous president of the Association, known and admired for his humour. The annual meeting of the Association that Alain organized in Bordeaux is still remembered for the particularly special social programme, which took advantage of the most famous export from Bordeaux, with visits arranged to famous vineyards, as well as a trip to see the prehistoric wall paintings in Lascaux. You will find his obituary written by Andre Bozio elsewhere in this issue.¹ Janos Kamaras, and Bela Zaborszky, both from Hungary, were early members of this society when it still used to be a club of friends working in the field of paediatric cardiology. They both contributed significantly to the spread of knowledge concerning Cardiology in the Young in Hungary and its surrounding countries. One of us (AS) will shortly be presenting an obituary for these colleagues. Michael Schlemmer was a very much appreciated paediatric cardiologist who worked at the University Children's Hospital of Vienna along with Maria Wimmer. He has passed on at a very young age, much too early for his young children and his wife, as well as all his colleagues who remained eager both to work with him and to learn from him. Despite a worthy battle, he sadly lost out to malignant disease. Council was also informed of the death of Manuel Quero-Jiménez, another early member of the Association, whose obituary has already been published in the pages of the Journal.² We all appreciated his hard-fought battles to promote the recognition of paediatric cardiology in Spain. We sincerely hope that the paediatric cardiologists of Spain will now follow his lead, and finally join the Association for European Paediatric Cardiology, for which Manuel did so much.