50 AO facts
- AO stands for the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für
Osteosynthesefragen which was better known in English as the
Association for the Study of Internal Fixation.
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Other anniversaries occurring this jubilee year include:
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- The
AO Research Fund is 25 years old in 2008.
- AO ORP courses celebrate 45 years of existence during the AO's 50th
anniversary year. The first AO ORP course was held in
Switzerland in 1963.
- The first AOSpine course was held 25
years ago in Davos, Switzerland.
- Synbone the company which provides
synthetic bones for AO courses celebrates 20 years of existence in 2008.
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In 2004 it was calculated that in the 20 years between 1984 to
2004:
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- The AO Research Fund distributed 33 million Swiss Francs to 633
projects worldwide.
- 3,240 AO courses with close to 230,000 participants were held.
- The AO Foundation spent 510 million Swiss Francs on research,
development, teaching, documentation, and the dissemination of the
AO Principles.
- Thanks to the AO Davos Course weeks and symposia held in Davos,
participants filled local businesses' coffers to the tune of 170 million Swiss
Francs.
- The salaries of the almost 200 employees in Davos along with orders to
local suppliers puts 29 million Swiss Francs into the local economy of this
alpine resort.
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- 100% of all trainees and over 70% of all practicing surgeons in New
Zealand have attended an AO course.
- The AO boasts an international faculty of over 3,000 experts in more than
100 countries.
- The AO Video & Multimedia team produces up to 50 educational
videotapes a year.
- On average, every day, somewhere in the world an AO course takes
place.
- The AO worked on a project with the American space agency NASA to develop
a simulator on which astronauts could learn to perform operations on one
another in case one of them is injured in space.
- The first AO scholarship was awarded in 1969 to enable two British
surgeons to travel to Switzerland.
- By the year 2000, close to 110,000 AO textbooks had been distributed.
- The Clinical Documentation and Investigation Department of the
AO Foundation has over two million slides of documented fracture cases stored
in the AO Center.
- The AO Principles of Fracture Management book is available in 9 different
languages.
- Since the AO Fellowship program began in 1971, a total of about 5,700
Fellows have been sponsored.
