♦ 20 July 2018 ♦

Summer is here in Europe and its holiday time for many of you…We wish you a nice summer time!
Happy holidays!

♦ 13-14 June 2018 ♦

The 10th annual meeting organized by the EURL for rabies was held on 13th and 14th June in the premises of the brand new Belgian laboratory "Sciensano" in Uccles, near Brussels, Belgium. Fifty-three scientists from European Member States and neighboring countries as well as personalities from official institutions met for a day of exchanges on rabies. Presentations and discussions focused on the epidemiology of rabies in Europe and in bordering countries as well as on techniques relating to rabies diagnosis, with, as every year, a specific presentation analyzing the results and performances of the laboratories during the inter-laboratory tests from the previous year. The international institutions (European Commission, OIE and Taiex) have also presented interesting perspectives as regards the programs for the elimination of the disease in wildlife in 2020 in Europe, and 2030 for human rabies in the world – some ambitious objectives for which mandated laboratories (by the OIE, WHO and/or FAO) will be encouraged to participate actively. A practical example developed in West and Central Africa was also presented by Dr. Jakob Zinsstag from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute of Basel, Switzerland, who was invited as a guest of honor. The meeting has been very successful thank to all of you who participated to this important event! Presentations are available on the restricted part (members only) of the EURL website.

♦ 24 July 2018 ♦

The very first EURL for rabies newsletter was sent to the EURL network on March 2015. This newsletter, which was first intended for EU MS NRLs, was soon available to a larger audience, such as the bordering country laboratories, official international institutions, NGOs, etc… The provided information focuses mainly on rabies in Europe and in the Mediterranean Basin as well as on innovation in research and tool development, and more recently on rabies serology. From 45 recipients at the beginning, the EURL for rabies newsletter is now dispatched to nearly 200 scientists and interested persons all over the world! Thank you for the growing interest you all showed to this letter. However, today’s newsletter should be the last one for 2018. Next issue should be issue beginning of next year.

 

♦ 17 May 2018 ♦

[Relayed from freepatentsonline.com website] Described herein is a method of identifying a monoclonal antibody (or antigen-binding fragment thereof) that specifically binds a plurality of lyssaviruses for use in post-exposure rabies prophylaxis or in the treatment of clinical rabies. The method includes using a naive antibody phage display library to screen for phage clones that bind whole recombinant rabies virus or cells expressing glycoprotein from multiple lyssaviruses (such as RABV, MOKV and WCBV) and/or specifically bind recombinant glycoprotein from different lyssaviruses.  [Read more…]

 

♦ 24 May 2018 ♦

[Relayed from the OIE website] The 86th OIE General Session was the occasion to give OIE Member Countries, an overview of the global animal health situation, as well as to analyse trends in the evolution of priority terrestrial and aquatic animal diseases. In addition, new disease status were officially recognised for 10 countries. One of the key missions of the OIE is to ensure transparency of the global animal health situation, including zoonoses. The situation of global animal health was presented to the Assembly based on the reports submitted to the OIE by Member as well as non-member Countries between 1 January 2017 and 6 May 2018. Particular attention was paid to specific [Read more…]

 

♦ 04 July 2018 ♦

[Relayed from the GARC ERN website] Currently human rabies continues to rage in Algeria. In the last decade, there was an average of 15 to 20 cases of rabies/year with 100,000 to 120,000 cases of bites affecting mostly children under 15 years of age. Following Algeria's participation in MEEREB/MERACON in 2015 and 2018 and the sharing of knowledge and experiences on the ground of the different participating countries and international organizations, they are putting in place a more adequate rabies control program to eliminate animal rabies, which will result in a reduction or even elimination of human rabies cases. [Read more…]
 

♦ 01 September 2018 ♦

[Text from F. Cliquet during 10th workshop for rabies]

Following this presentation on the History and Activities in the Belgian rabies NRL, I would like to take few minutes to say with some emotion some words about one person from this laboratory, one person we appreciate a lot in our laboratory, a person who contributed in the eighties and nineties to the development of oral vaccines and methods for rabies control in fox populations in Europe. Dr Bernard Brochier, just after obtaining his DVM and PhD diplomas in 1981 started his career at the University of Liège as Head of the service dedicated to rabies and wildlife diseases. From 1997 to 2002, he continued his activities in rabies field at the Pasteur Institute of Brabant as the head of the NRL for rabies. As explained by Sanne, this institute was merged in 2003 to the Scientific Institute of Public Health which has been integrated recently to Sciensano. Bernard is still part of the Viral diseases service of this new institute. Bernard has become an international renowned scientist with more than 160 papers.

Bernard was one of the pioneers in the concept of oral vaccination of foxes in Europe and its first implementation in the field. He demonstrated that inactivated vaccines were not efficient for the oral route, and he was highly involved in the validation of oral vaccines, particularly the V-RG which was the unique vaccine used in Belgium. He developed the methods in the field on small then large scale areas to evaluate the bait uptake in young and adult fox populations, as well as safety, efficacy and quality controls of candidate oral vaccines. He succeeded to publish in the famous review Nature a paper showing the efficacy of the oral vaccination method on large scales areas in Belgium using a recombinant vaccine. Bernard largely contributed to rabies elimination in Belgium which was achieved in 2001. He worked also on many different viruses such as TBE, coronaviruses, hepatitis C and E, Influenza, BSE, Influenza, Puumala, and also on parasites particularly on Echinococcosis multilocularis but also on Toxocara, trichinellosis and toxoplasmosis. He was recently deeply involved in a study of the dynamics of European bat lyssaviruses in a selected colony of bats in which positive bats were recently diagnosed. As part of a larger study on the Epidemiology of TBEV in Belgium, Bernard is currently closely involved in experimental infection studies of locally captured wild rodents to better understand the virus kinetics in these reservoir hosts.

We are very sad, as Bernard will leave his group and all of us next September for his retirement, it will be the start of a second life for him and we wish you Bernard all the best for you and your close relatives! We will miss you, and we will remember you as a very friendly collaborator, thank you very much Bernard.