The 13th Meningitis Research Foundation Conference will be held online November 1-3, 2021. It will bring together world-renowned experts to discuss the latest advances and current challenges in meningitis and sepsis.

Many MEVACP team members will participate in this conference and Dr. Diallo Kanny from the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d'Ivoire (CSRS) and Dr. Odile Harrison from the University of Oxford will present posters on behalf of the group during the afternoon session on Tuesday, November 2, 2021.

Dr. Diallo will present a poster entitled "In silico evaluation of current PCR diagnostic targets for the molecular detection of bacterial meningitis" in the Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment category.

Dr. Harrison will present a poster entitled "MEVacP: a public engagement website about meningitis and vaccine policy" in the Surveillance, Support and Advocacy category. Dr. Harrison will also be presenting on Group B Streptococcus entitled "Hypervirulence and Group B Streptococcal Infection" in which she will explain how genome sequence data can be used to improve our understanding of the population biology of this bacterium.

Both posters were selected for a 5-minute presentation. Their presentations are part of WHO's new global roadmap to defeat meningitis by 2030, as they focus on two of its pillars: improving diagnostic tests and engaging the public to increase awareness against meningitis.  

"One of the public health goals set by WHO is to defeat meningitis by 2030. Raising awareness against meningitis is essential to achieving this goal. It is in this context that we are developing a bilingual website that should become a repository of public engagement tools and relevant information on meningitis for the African public, health professionals, researchers, and policy makers," explains Dr. Kanny Diallo, local MEVacP principal investigator at the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques in Côte d'Ivoire.

The Meningitis Research Foundation is a UK-based charity whose mission is to defeat meningitis and sepsis worldwide (https://www.meningitis.org/).