Reflections on ASTMH Conference 2015
By Sandra Chishimba on January 21, 2016 in Capacity Building, Malaria, News
First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge the travel funds from Akros for providing me a great opportunity allowing me to attend the 2015 annual meeting American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH). ASTMH is an interdisciplinary organization for the field of tropical medicine, and the annual meeting is for all scientists whose work is in tropical medicine around the world. The research topics ranged from basic science to clinical research. The conference program was divided into two blocks: oral presentations and poster presentations. Presentations of interest to the general audience were arranged for the morning and afternoon. The poster sessions were scheduled for lunch time.
The meeting began on Sunday evening with the keynote lecture given by an eminent scientist, Rajiv Shah MD who formerly opened the meetings. During this session we also had a moment of silence in honour of the former late president Dr Allan McGill who died suddenly.
The oral presentations were about 15 minutes each. The presenters were clinicians, researchers, PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and some MSc students. The presentations were of high quality cutting edge science research and a broad range of topics were covered. The topics were subdivided into Global health, Clinical, Virology, Molecular, Cellular, and Immunoparasitology research. Much emphasis was made on combating new infections during the global health discussions. This was with reference to the most recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. It was clear that the research field, and health systems around the world, need to be strengthened and prepared in the event of a major disease outbreak. Malaria research was a topic not to be missed. New cutting edge techniques on how to investigate ultra-low infections as malaria elimination is being implemented in several countries were presented. Such ideas work to our advantage as we can then interact personally with the researchers by asking questions in person at the meeting and after the meeting in the event that we decide to follow up on the idea for our research.
