Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of WHO, was sent a letter
In 1999, Audur Gudjónsdóttir, RNOR, sent a letter to Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was then the Director General of WHO, and asked her whether it would be possible that WHO would take the initiative to collect information on experimental spinal cord treatments into a database.
This letter became the root of the prime reason that Audur Gudjónsdóttir and the Ministries of Health and Foreign Affairs in Iceland held, together with WHO, a conference in Iceland in 2001 with 26 pioneers from all over the world in the treatment of spinal cord injury. The result of the conference was that a database should be created holding information on all experimental treatments of spinal cord injury.