Facts and Figures

I’m never satisfied until I’ve got some figures to back things up. Well, that’s not really true; I know my football team is the best in the world, even though I may have to stretch my confidence limits a little, but that’s something I’d rather not go into too deeply. So what are the stats on ICE/ECE 2012?

We are looking at a total of around 5500 attendees. I say “around”, because of course the figure continues to change, as people arrive perhaps for only a day or even an individual session. But whichever way you look at it, the 15^th ICE and 14^th ECE have certainly attracted a huge amount of delegates from all corners of the globe, so I think that both the ISE and the ESE can afford to pat themselves on the backs on this.

The delegates come really from just about everywhere. The biggest group of course come from Italy. There were 512 Italian pre-registrants, with Spain (323), South America (308) in the silver and bronze positions respectively (sorry, I’m just getting ready for the Olympics). Following those, we had the UK in the familiar Olympic role of being just outside the medal positions in 4^th (with 242 delegates), Turkey with 231, the USA with 209, and France with 206. Despite the well-publicised financial problems in Greece, they are to be congratulated on sending 178 delegates, just ahead of Germany on 170.

But there are also some interesting trends. For example, we had 180 delegates from the Middle East, which is an area of great importance to both societies. Next year’s ECE hosts, Denmark, sent 60 delegates, which shows the strength of endocrinology in a country with a population of 5.7 million. But on a per-capita basis, it may be that the Estonians (30 delegates for 1.3million population) or the Swiss (with 129 delegates for a population of 8 million) should take the overall prizes.