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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 |