An international workshop to identify research priorities to improve human plague control.
For most of the people living in high-income countries, plague is a disease that belongs to the middle-age. But the reality is that for the past 30 years, WHO has reported a continuously increasing number of human cases of plague and the disease is considered as “re-emergent” on different continents.
In August 2017, a particularly severe pulmonary plague epidemic hit two major urban settings of Madagascar. More than 2400 cases were notified and 200 deaths were officially reported. Alongside national health authorities and other international organizations, the Institut Pasteur de Madagascar with support from the Institut Pasteur and took a decisive part in fighting this unprecedent outbreak.
How can we improve our knowledge on the mechanisms behind this re-emergence and the reported outbreaks? What research priorities do we need to implement to better understand, diagnose and control plague.
Caption: "Can we make human plague history?" international workshop - Institut Pasteur, 9th-10th July 2018
In order to respond to those questions and coordinate international scientific and funding efforts, the Institut Pasteur de Madagascar, INSERM, INSERM Reacting and Institut Pasteur jointly organized an international workshop on plague hosted on the 9th and 10th of July at the Institut Pasteur (Paris). Gathering key plague experts and funding institutions, this workshop aimed at identifying the priority activities to move forward key translational and operational research activities and at preparing their implementation at a larger scale in some targeted countries such as Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru and the USA. The main outcomes of this workshop will be published in the coming months in a peer-review journal.
The organizing committee of the 13th International Yersinia symposium took the opportunity to discuss the preliminary agenda of this meeting that will take place for the first time in Africa, on the 5th-8th of August 2019 at the Institut Pasteur in Madagascar and that will precede an International course on plague in Madagascar.
