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US-India symposium on infectious diseases begins
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 06 January 2004, 20:30 IST
NEW DELHI: A five-day national symposium organized by the U. S. Army Medical Research and Material Command and the Sir Dorabji Tata Centre for Research in Tropical Diseases began at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on Tuesday.
The January 6-10 symposium will focus on the newest medical biotechnology techniques and their application to the development of drugs, vaccines and other products, that will contribute in preventing and treating infectious diseases of interest to both countries.
Approximately 200 civilian and military biomedical scientists from the two countries, plus students in the biomedical sciences, have been invited to participate.
The symposium responds to several concerns facing both the U. S. and India: the spread of traditional diseases due to global warming and refugee movement, the increased use of antibiotics leading to widespread drug resistance, the appearance of relatively "new" and/or bizarre diseases, and the growing list of diseases for which effective drugs and vaccines are not yet available. Diseases of particular interest include malaria, bacterial diarrhea, dengue fever, viral encephalitis, filariasis, leishmaniasis, rabies, polio, measles, and other infectious diseases. The prospect of expediting their control by using vaccines will be discussed.
The initial outcome of the symposium will be a report containing abstracts and proceedings, and a set of recommendations for future efforts. The longer-term outcome is the likely expansion of collaborative research efforts between individual investigators and between research organizations of the two countries. The latter is critically important because the increasing size and complexity of biomedical product development efforts nearly always demand multi-organizational and usually multi-national participation. The symposium highlights the need for a concerted effort to control these largely preventable infections.
The seminar coordinators are, for India, Lt Gen (Dr.) D. Raghunath (Retd) (Principal Executive, Sir Dorabji Tata); and, for the U. S., COL Raj K. Gupta, Director, Research Plans and Programs, U. S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA. Partial funding for the symposium is provided by the Indo-U. S. Science and Technology Forum. The U. S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the US National Science Foundation are also supporting the symposium.