The Australian Infectious Diseases Research Centre invites you to its annual seminar by the Australian Museum Eureka Prize winner, Professor Andrew Steer.
Registrations are essential for this event, which has limited seating.
Canapés will be served following the seminar.
Event Details
Date: Wednesday 28 March
Time: 4.00pm, followed by canapés
Location: ViewPoint (Building 33), UQ St Lucia
Contact: Karen Vowles, Faculty of Science (ph 3443 31097) science.engagement@uq.edu.au
Andrew Steer
Professor Andrew Steer is a paediatric infectious diseases physician in the Department of General Medicine at the Royal Children’s Hospital; Director of Infection and Immunity and Group Leader of the Group A Streptococcal Research Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute; and principal research fellow in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne.
He is also a founding committee member and current chair of the International Alliance for the Control of Scabies.
Andrew’s research interests are epidemiology and control of tropical childhood skin diseases particularly scabies; group A streptococcal clinical and molecular epidemiology; group A streptococcal vaccine research; and rheumatic heart disease pathogenesis, epidemiology and control.
The Neglected Tropical Disease movement, and the public health case for scabies control
Neglected tropical diseases (“NTDs”) are a group of diverse infectious diseases that afflict the poorest of the poor.
The NTDs are frequently chronic and debilitating diseases, and contribute to an ongoing cycle of poverty through their negative effects on human health, their economic impact on families and through stigmatisation.
Around the time of the launch of the Millennium Development Goals, a global movement began that aimed to control and even eventually eliminate the NTDs.
Much progress has been made since that time with large and highly effective programmes established in many low and middle income countries, with ongoing support from several major non-governmental organisations as well as individual governments themselves.
A key feature of these control programmes has been implementation of mass drug administration as a central component.
Although a latecomer to the NTD movement, scabies is a classic NTD and recent evidence produced by Andrew and his group suggest that mass drug administration may be a highly effective strategy for control of the disease at a public health level, although a number of challenges lie ahead.
Andrew will chart the history of the NTD movement, describe the NTDs themselves, introduce scabies as an NTD and discuss future public health and research priorities to advance global control of scabies.
A pledge to AID goes directly into the research of issues that impact the lives of many people and their families.