The 16th International Conference on Lyme Borreliosis and Other Tick-borne Diseases starts today in Amsterdam and we have funded someone to go on our behalf and report back.
No-one from LDA was free to attend, though we have attended many international conferences in the past, often being the only UK representatives. Time to get UK researchers more involved!
This time we are paying the travel costs and delegate fee for a research fellow from the University of Liverpool to attend, and to provide us with a report. Lucy Delaney is working on a UK Lyme Cohort study, investigating a group (a cohort) of patients diagnosed with Lyme disease in Primary Care. As she wasn’t able to fund herself to attend, we thought it was a really useful opportunity for us to enable her to meet many of the researchers that Sandra and Stella have met at conferences and meetings over the past 10 years.
We have e-introduced her to some researchers who will be there, which we hope will make it easier for her to make contacts. There is nothing quite like standing in a queue for coffee and asking someone “what do you think about … x, y, z?” You often get the informal answer and explanation that you never get in a published paper. You can test your ideas and gain from the experience of others. We hope this will benefit UK research on Lyme disease.
The full program is here. The Dutch hosts for this year have done some very good research involving patients and looking at their concerns. This is reflected in the programme. It is notable that at the start of the conference there was a symposium for patients with speakers that patients will want to hear from! Wish you were there?
In the main conference a few presentations stand out as potentially very interesting:
We hope to give you some updates as the conference proceeds – check our Twitter and Facebook posts. There will be a fuller report at the end when Lucy has had time to draw breath.
Printer Friendly