Keynote speakers

The consensus and beyond: developing new tools to reconstruct transmission pathways of foot-and-mouth disease virus.

Don King

Dr Don King is Head of the Vesicular Disease Reference Laboratory at The Pirbright Institute. He is interested in the application of genome sequences to monitor the global epidemiology and evolution of important livestock disease agents such as foot-and-mouth disease virus. These data are also used to develop new molecular diagnostic methods that support the control of FMD outbreaks. In addition to a long-standing involvement in EPIZONE, Don currently participates in European collaborative research projects that aim to develop new diagnostic tools (Rapidia-Field), and to use next-generation sequencing approaches for molecular epidemiology (Epi-Seq).

New coronaviruses- what next?

Jean-Claude Manuguerra

Jean-Claude Manuguerra, head of the Laboratory for Urgent Response to Biological Threats at Institut Pasteur (IP) since 2002, qualified as a vet before doing his PhD in virology at IP. He was co-director of the National Flu Centre for North France, one of the 13 laboratories of the WHO Laboratory Network on SARS (1994-2003). He was sent to Hanoi for the control of the SARS outbreak in 2003. From 2000 to now, he’s been a member of the steering committee of GOARN and chaired it from 2011 to 2013.

Epidemiology of ASF in Eastern Europe and the risk derived from it.

Lina Mur

Lina Mur obtained her Degree in Veterinary Medicine (DVM) (2004-2009) and “Master in Research of Veterinary Sciences” (2009-2010) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Since September 2009, she joined the OIE Reference Laboratory for African swine fever (ASF) directed by Professor Jose Manuel Sanchez-Vizcaino, where she has being doing research on the epidemiology and diagnosis of ASF. In the epidemiology area, her research mainly focused on the risk of ASF introduction into the EU and the control of ASF in different affected scenarios (Africa, Sardinia and Russian Federation). In the area of diagnosis, she worked in the development of new tests for antibodies detection in oral fluid from infected domestic pig and wild boar. All these research studies are incorporated on her Ph.D thesis that will be presented this year.

Big Data and disease monitoring – The next new thing or old news?

Nils Toft

Nils Toft is professor, Section for Epidemiology, National Veterinary Institute, Technical University of Denmark. Nils Toft has focused his research on improving the use of imperfect data for decision making in livestock production. Specifically he has devoted considerable time to work on improving the decision making and inference from imperfect diagnostic tests, register based data, or data collected automatically. As an example, he has been heavily involved in establishing the foundation for a cost-effective control program for paratuberculosis  in Danish Dairy Cattle. His current research focuses on combining databases from laboratories with existing registers to improve monitoring and control of diseases.

High containment infrastructure Projects to optimise Animal and Public Health Innovation.

Norbert Stockhofe-Zurwieden

Norbert Stockhofe-Zurwieden studied veterinary medicine at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover and specialized in the field of veterinary pathology. He is employed as senior researcher at the Central Veterinary Institute, Wageningen UR in Lelystad, NL and since more than 20 years highly involved in the pathology and pathogenesis of endemic and notifyable infectious diseases. In the last years he was part of the management team of the EU infrastructure project NADIR and organized the transnational access activities of the consortium.

African swine fever in domestic pigs and European wild boar - Experiences from recent animal studies

Sandra Blome

Sandra Blome studied veterinary medicine at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University in Leipzig, Germany, from 1996 to 2002 . Thereafter, she moved to the EURL for CSF in Hannover, where she defended her thesis on the pathogenesis of classical swine fever in 2006. From June 2004, she was officially employed at the EURL as head of the virus laboratory. In June 2008 she moved to the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI).

Currently, she is the head of the German national reference laboratories for classical and African swine fever. In this position, she is involved in several national and international research projects. Her main interest in ASF is pathogenesis in different host systems and vaccine design in collaboration with molecular biologists.