Congratulations to Martyn Kirk on a successful NHMRC Career Development Fellowship that will focus on using applied epidemiology to respond to contaminated foods and environments

Martyn Kirk and Katie Glass ran a two-day meeting in Brisbane on the CampySource Partnership Project.  It was great to have attendees from most states and territories, and also to collaborate with colleagues in New Zealand running a similar project.   We are just starting to conduct whole genome sequencing on isolates and are very interested to see relatedness of isolates from different sources, different states, and over time.

Andrea Parisi has just returned from presenting a poster at ID Week in San Diego, and visiting the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle.   Andrea has had the opportunity to collaborate with the IHME on estimates of the global burden of disease due to invasive Salmonella for the GBD 2017 study.   Funding for her travel came from the Geoff Mercer Travel Award and the Vice Chancellor’s Travel Grant.

Martyn Kirk and the group have hosted a visit from Chia-ping Su, a medical officer from Taiwan Centres for Disease Control this month.  It’s been a great opportunity to compare field epidemiology training programs and infectious disease surveillance methods.

Papers

• Wilson HL, Kennedy KJ, Moffatt CR. Epidemiology of non‐typhoid Salmonella infection in the Australian Capital Territory over a 10 year period. Internal Medicine Journal. 2017 Oct 2.
• Agostino J, Ferguson JK, Eastwood K, Kirk MD. The increasing importance of community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections.
• Hoffmann S, Devleesschauwer B, Aspinall W, Cooke R, Corrigan T, Havelaar A, Angulo F, Gibb H, Kirk M, Lake R, Speybroeck N, Torgerson P, Hald T. Attribution  of global foodborne disease to specific foods: Findings from a World Health Organization structured expert elicitation. PLoS One. 2017 Sep 14;12(9):e0183641.