From the co-ordinator

5th EPIZONE ERG Annual Meeting
The coming annual meeting in Madrid in September will be the 5th annual meeting of the EPIZONE ERG and the 10th annual meeting of EPIZONE! A wonderful achievement of us all: our partner institutes, our scientists and all colleagues and supporters from outside our network coming to our meetings. In our annual meetings we have established very good cooperation with other research networks, with ESVV and our sponsors from industry. We aim to continue our annual meetings in this very successful format in the coming years, also with the intention to combine the meeting with the ESVV meeting again.   

20th partner of EPIZONE!
In 2016 the National Veterinary Research Institute of Serbia has become the 20st partner of EPIZONE! With the increasing number of partners and its solid networking activities EPIZONE has become an evident network of scientists to consult for the European Commission, OIE and other organisations involved in animal infectious disease control. Our aim will be to try to include more institutes in more countries, and strengthen our network even more. 

Brexit
As EPIZONE, we were as surprised about the Brexit as a lot of foreign countries. However, like the British government we have to respect the choice of the British people. Within EPIZONE we have two partner institutes form the UK and both of these institutes have always been very active and valuable partners of our network. Therefore we definitely hope that both the Pirbright Institute as well as APHA will stay to be member of EPIZONE so we can continue our cooperations also in the longer future.

Wim van der Poel
Co-ordinator EPIZONE