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Infectious Diseases
Subdivision Report
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By
Frederick S. Nolte, PhD, D(ABMM), F(AAM)
Chair, Infectious Diseases Subdivision
e-mail: nolte@musc.edu |
Greetings
from historic Charleston and the South Carolina low country,
with best wishes for 2009! I am proud to serve as the
Infectious Diseases Subdivision Chair and take this
opportunity to thank Frank Cockerill for his efforts
as the outgoing Chair, and welcome David Persing as
the Chair-Elect. Frank did a great job in organizing the
Infectious Diseases portion of the Program for the 2008
Meeting and Dave is already making significant contributions
as we put together the Program plan for the 2009 Meeting in
Orlando.
I also
want to recognize other members for their contributions to
the mission of the Infectious Diseases Subdivision in 2008:
Aaron Bossler, Clinical Practice Committee; Kenneth
Bahk and Randy Hayden, Nominating Committee; and
Matt Bankowski, Training and Education Committee.
I look forward to working with our incoming Representatives to the
Clinical Practice Committee, Donna Wolk and
Belinda Yen-Lieberman, the Nominating Committee,
Jeanne Carr, and the Training and Education
Committee, Carol Holland.
By all
measures the 2008 Annual Meeting in Grapevine was a success
and thanks are due to all the speakers. The Infectious
Diseases Subdivision sponsored an Early Bird Session, two
Workshops, Platform Presentations of Selected Infectious
Diseases Abstracts, and a Plenary Session. The Early Bird
Session on microorganism identification by sequence analysis
was presented by Cathy Petti, ARUP Laboratories, and
Nancy Wengenack, Mayo Clinic. Despite the early
hour it was well attended and the audience was rewarded with
excellent talks on the clinical relevance of microbial
diversity by Cathy and sequence-based identification of
mycobacteria and fungi by Nancy. Cathys performance was
particularly remarkable, considering she was up all night
with food poisoning prior to her talk!
Terry
Wright
delivered a comprehensive and insightful update on hepatitis
B virus as one of our Workshops. The second Workshop was
jointly sponsored by the Clinical Practice Committee and
focused on quantitative testing for BK polyomavirus. It was
moderated by Aaron Bossler with presentations on the
clinical applications; and assay design, validation, and
reference material by me and Linda Cook, respectively.
Support for establishing an AMP working group to advance the
development of standardized reference material for BKV DNA
was expressed at the workshop.
Those interested in working on this project
should contact Donna Wolk directly (dwolk@email.arizona.edu).
Greg
Storch served double duty at the 2008 Meeting. He
presented a state-of-the-art lecture on multiplex assays for
respiratory viruses as a Plenary Session speaker for the
Infectious Diseases Subdivision, and then participated as a
panel member in a Special Topics Plenary Session on clinical
development, validation, and application of multiplex
assays.
The
platform presentations of selected posters were well
attended and will be back by popular demand for the 2009
Meeting. The number and quality of the posters this year
made the selection of just six for oral presentation very
difficult, but that is just the kind of problem we want.
The
Program for the 2009 Annual Meeting is still under
development as of this writing; however, the topics under
consideration by the Program Planning Committee for the
Infectious Diseases sessions include: clinical applications
of mass spectrometry; role of nucleic acid tests in
diagnosis of Clostridium difficile disease; molecular
diagnostics in resource-poor settings; adenovirus infections
in transplant recipients; and deep sequencing for HIV
tropism and drug resistance. As always, your thoughts for
topics for the 2009 or other future meetings are welcomed.
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