As the date of the 2018 edition of the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) Conference draws near, the body has provided an opportunity for intending participants to register at the conference venue. This means that even though registration closed on the company’s website last week, participants who were not able to meet the online registration deadline, now have the chance to register physically at the venue of the conference.
The ASLM Conference, scheduled to hold from December 10 to 13, 2018, at Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, Nigeria, will play host to hundreds of delegates from across Africa. The conference theme this year is: ‘Preventing and Controlling the Next Pandemic: The Role of the Laboratory’. This is the first time the conference will be held outside Cape Town, South Africa, where the first three editions were staged.
The conference will be chaired by co-founder and the Executive Director of the International Research Centre of Excellence at the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria, Prof. Alash’le Abimiku. She is a Professor at the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore. The co-chair of the conference is founder of Institut de Recherche en Santé, de Surveillance Epidémiologique et de Formations (IRESSEF), Prof. Souleymane Mboup.
The conference will feature plenary, breakout and poster sessions, culminating in an awards ceremony on the last day of the event. The event will also feature presentations, poster sessions, special sessions and symposia. The Roundtable discussions will focus on topics such as leveraging and sustaining networks for disease response in Africa; data intelligence, biological specimen repository for outbreak response, role of National public health institutes in pandemic response and Africa regional laboratory networks.
Speakers at the conference include Senior Director of the Diagnostic Services at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Dr. Trevor Peter; Director of African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. John Nkengasong; Founder and Director of the International Centre for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP), Dr. Waafa El Sadr, and South Africa’s National Health Laboratory Service official, Dr. Wendy Stevens.
Other speakers who will be facilitating on-going dialogues at ASLM 2018 include: Prof. Alimuddin Zumla, Dr. Caroline Jehu-Appiah, Dr. Ogobara Doumbo, Dr. Rebecca Martin, Dr. Chewe Luo and Prof. Oyewale Tomori. Also included in the speaker line-up are Dr. Jay Varma, Dr. Philip Onyebujoh, Dr. Merawi Aragaw, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, Dr. Abdourahmane Sow, Dr. Djoudalbaye Benjamin and Prof. Iruka Okeke.
