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ASTMH 63th annual meeting

24th November 2013

A symposium «Thirty years of international and inter-disciplinary cooperation on echinococcosis in China» has been organized at the 63th annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygien, Wahsington on the 16th of November 2013

Summary
China is currently the country where the majority of cases of echinococcosis, i.e. both Cystic (CE) and Alveolar Echinococcosis (AE) are observed worldwide. In the 1980s, UK-Chinese, then in the 1990s, UK-French-Chinese cooperative research work showed that the majority of cases worldwide were actually in Western China, with prevalence of CE averaging up to 5% in endemic areas of the Tibetan plateau, and in Xinjiang and Ningxia Autonomous Regions, and prevalence of an otherwise very rare disease, AE, up to 15% in villages of Gansu province, 100 times higher than the highest prevalence in endemic regions of Europe. An unprecedented multidisciplinary and international effort (including epidemiology, clinical research, immunology, pharmacology, veterinary medicine, public health, ecology, geography, sociology...), widely supported by Chinese as well as European, US, Australian, and Japanese funding, has provided the necessary scientific knowledge on the situation regarding echinococcosis to make it recognized by the Chinese ministries of Health and of Agriculture among the main zoonoses associated with a major public health impact in the rural populations of China, within the past decade. This ASTMH symposium focuses on this international cooperation on echinococcosis in China, with the aim to show how, at a continent scale, a public health problem associated with a parasitic disease has brought significant progress in all fields of research through a progressively organized network of scientists and clinicians from all over the world, and make of China the first country/continent where echinococcosis is no longer a "neglected disease"

Programme

Donald P. McManus The Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Brisbane, Australia Thirty years of international and inter-disciplinary cooperation on echinococcosis in China.A personal experience
Patrick Giraudoux Chrono-environment dept, University of Franche-Comte/CNRS and Institut Universitaire de France, Besançon, France Landscape, host diversity, human and animal behavior and spatial prediction of alveolar echinococcosis in western China
Dominique A. Vuitton WHO Collaborating Centre, University of Franche-Comte, Besançon, France Interactions between Echinococcus sp. and their hosts: lessons learnt in China
Peter Kern Comprehensive Infectious Diseases Center, Ulm University, WHO Informal Working Group on Echinococcosis, Ulm, Germany Symposium Organizer