MEDICAL CONGRESS TO DISCUSS "MEDICINE AND HUMAN RIGHTS"

VATICAN CITY, JUL 3, 2000 (VIS) - Within the framework of Jubilee Year celebrations, 4,000 doctors and scientists from 42 countries will start the five-day 20th World Congress of Catholic Doctors this evening at 6:30 in Rome on the theme "Medicine and Human Rights."

According to communiques from the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, the Association of Italian Catholic Doctors and the European Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, the participants in the congress "will debate problems which today trouble public opinion, from euthanasia to violence on children, from the rights of older people to the last moments of the ill, from assistance to the terminally ill to torture, from bioethics to abortion, from genetic engineering to a doctor's freedom of conscience.

"At the center of the congress will be the search for a new way to practice medicine and a diverse approach to patients, a way which will know how to reconcile scientific progress with the new frontiers of morality."

Among the sponsors of the congress are the Pontifical Academy for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers and the Pontifical Academy of Life.

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