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9th Annual Meeting, France 2015

The 9th annual meeting EPIZONE was organized together with the Xth international conference of the European Society of Veterinary Virology (ESVV). Under the slogan ‘Changing Viruses in a Changing World’ ESVV started first on the 31st of August and on Wednesday September 2nd EPIZONE officially joined in.

Since the majority of EPIZONE scientists work on viruses, a lot of our researchers were present on August 31st already for a welcome drink. Thereby showing their appreciation to join with ESVV for a meeting in the same venue: The convenient conference centre ‘Le Corum’ in the beautiful city of Montpellier. See programme here.

102 oral- and 250 poster presentations
EPIZONE together with ESVV was able to invite 9 keynote speakers who did excellent presentations which were very well attended. In total we had around 400 delegates, taking care of 102 oral presentations and more than 250 poster presentations. Special on this meeting were the ‘Animal health in the Caribbean’ sessions and also this year some other related projects took the opportunity to meet aside the EPIZONE annual meeting.

Young EPIZONE
Young EPIZONE had their meeting on the day of September 2nd, which was attended by 30 to 50 young scientists, of whom the majority also joined for a dinner on the same day. Three sessions were organized: first session: ‘how to manage the stress’, second session: ‘how to do a job interview’, third session with four invited speakers: Jose -Manuel Sanchez-Vizcaino, president of ESVV; Josie Golding, post-doc in King’s College, London; Pascal Hudelet, DVM, R&D Project Leader at Merial, Wim van der Poel, coordinator EPIZONE. Especially the second session was well visited. See the YE meeting report here.

Poster awards ESVV/EPIZONE

  • EPIZONE Poster Award Giuseppe Mancini, IZS Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale, was rewarded with The EPIZONE Poster Award, sponsored by Ingenase. Title of the poster: “Mosquito species involved in West Nile and Usutu viruses transmission in Italy between 2008 and 2014”.
  • The Conference Poster Award was assigned to Timothee Vergne, Royal Veterinary College, London. Title of the poster: “Modelling the transmission tree of the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 epidemic in Israel, 2015”.
  • The ESVV Paul-Pierre Pastoret Poster Award was assigned to Johanne Hadsbjerg, DTU Vet Denmark.         Title of the poster: “Long range RNA-RNA interactions within the genome of classical swine fever virus; influence on viral RNA replication”.
  • The ESVV Paul-Pierre Pastoret Poster Award was assigned to Guillaume Croville, École Nationale Vétérinaire de Toulouse. Title of the poster“Dissecting respiratory viral co-infections in poultry using a nanofluidic PCR screening assay”.

Social events
Additional social events included a city tour on Wednesday and a Gala dinner. Helped by the sunny weather the city tour-walk was a pleasant happening and also a very interesting one because the hired guides did a fantastic job to explain a lot about the buildings and the history of Montpellier. The Gala dinner in the evening of September 2nd was a lively event with nice music and buffets with a lot of nice small dishes, snacks, deserts and of course drinks. Delegates moved around a lot and especially our younger colleagues danced until late in the night.

We look back on a very good and joyful 9th EPIZONE annual meeting, together with ESVV. ESVV and EPIZONE members mixed easily in a very friendly atmosphere. The meeting was very well organised and proceeded smoothly thanks to our hosting partner CIRAD and was sponsored by 10 companies; see here for the list.

We look forward to meeting each other again next year in September in Madrid for our 10th EPIZONE annual meeting.

See here : proceedings 9th AM

See the pictures and interviews of the event: