Friday 22 June 2001, at the Paris Air Show, Alain Bensoussan, Chairman of CNES (Centre
National d’Etudes Spatiales), and Ghislaine Alajouanine, President of the Force d’Intervention
Sanitaire Satellitaire Autoportée (FISSA), will sign a partnership agreement to set up a satellite-based
telemedicine network covering remote areas in developing countries. The President of Senegal, Mr
Abdoulaye Wade, accompanied by his wife Mrs Wade, will be at the signing ceremony. France’s
Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot, Health Minister Bernard Kouchner and Research Minister
Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg are also scheduled to attend.
CNES has been pursing efforts over the last three years to nurture new applications using space systems, working in close
cooperation with users in the NGO community and with health professionals. To this end, it is leading a major telemedicine
project—involving its own subsidiaries and research laboratories and in partnership with laboratories at universities and at
INSERM, the French national health and medical research institute—for which it has developed a portable satellite-based
telemedicine kit and a number of associated experimental telemedicine programmes.
FISSA is a non-governmental organization dedicated to humanitarian purposes. Today, FISSA is keen to exploit the
potential benefits of space systems within the scope of its activities, particularly for teleconsultations in remote regions.
Sanitary conditions on the African continent and in Senegal in particular, where people living in remote inland areas do not
have easy access to medical treatment, encouraged FISSA and CNES to conduct an initial review of needs for satellite-based
teleconsultations. The positive findings of this review, pursued in close collaboration with the Senegalese health authorities
and the Education Santé association chaired by the President’s wife Mrs Wade, indicated that a prototyping phase could
be initiated in the country in 2002.
The agreement to be signed on 22 June aims, through an initial pilot phase, to conduct a long-term study geared towards
clinical, logistic and economic validation of the system at three sites representative of the kind of medical problems
encountered in Senegal’s remotest regions. The system is designed primarily for perinatal teleconsultations (maternity and
newborn infants) and secondarily for general medicine. The three representative sites selected are in the regions of Richard
Toll, Kedougou and Tambacounda. The experiment control centre will be located at the main hospital in the capital city
Dakar. Each remote site will be equipped with a telemedicine kit and M4 Inmarsat terminals, as well as systems for
transmitting medical imagery from microscopes and ultrasonic scan equipment.
At the end of this pilot phase, CNES and FISSA could extend their cooperation to other regions of Africa and Madagascar,
where FISSA would coordinate humanitarian satellite-based telemedicine operations.
Members of the press who would like to attend the signing ceremony are asked first to call +33(0)1.41.69.30.85
to confirm their presence and to arrive at reception in the CNES chalet on Friday 22 June for 2.30 p.m.
Press Contacts: CNES – Sandra Laly, +33(0)1.41.69.30.85 or +33(0)6.08.48.39.31
FISSA – Ghislaine Alajouanine, +33(0)1.47.71.86.23 or +33(0)6.09.17.93.02
