Acknowledgement

The creation of this COPCORD World website was made possible by generous grants and invaluable support received from International League of Associations for Rheumatology (ILAR research award 2010), Bone and Joint Decade India and Arthritis Research Care Foundation-Center for Rheumatic Diseases (ARCF-CRD, Pune, India). This website was created in CRD under direct supervision of Dr Arvind Chopra, ILAR COPCORD coordinator. "We also take this opportunity to pay a special tribute to the COPCORD stalwarts who designed and launched the program, and special mention is made of Prof Ken Muirden (Australia), late Prof HA Valkenburg (The Netherlands), Dr RD Wigley (New Zealand), Prof Chen Shun-le (China) and Late Dr John Darmawan (Indonesia). Dr Wigley and Prof Hans Rasker (The Netherlands) very kindly provided several invaluable photographs of the earlier days of COPCORD and we thank them wholeheartedly. We also thank our colleagues in CRD, Pune for their outstanding contributions, and in particular Mr Deepak Songoji, Dr Ravi Ghorpade, Dr Anuradha V and Ms Manjit Saluja." .