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WorldLab Congress in Seoul postponed

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On behalf of the IFCC Executive Board to inform you that the WorldLab Congress in Seoul will be postponed due to the Coronavirus concerns and worldwide travel restrictions. A new date for the conference will be determined as soon as possible by the conference organizers, depending on the availability of the congress centre in Seoul. We are working closely with the local organizers and the PCO to select the most appropriate date and location for the congress. A formal announcement will be circulated as soon as a new date has been confirmed.

Kind regards,

Professor Maurizio Ferrari, IFCC President

Professor Khosrow Adeli, IFCC President-Elect

More information: www.ifcc.org

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IFCC eNews: No 3 – March 2020 edition

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EDITORIAL

  • Message from the eNews editor

THE VOICE OF IFCC

  • IFCC Developing Quality Competence in Medical Laboratories (DQCML)
  • The first course on basic cytometry in Cairo, Egypt
  • Activities carried out at WG-IANT 2014-2019

IFCC: THE PEOPLE

  • Welcome and Thanks to the Chairs

IFCC: THE YOUNG SCIENTISTS

  • 3rd Conference of the Young Scientists Working Group (YS-WG SIBioC)
  • IFCC TF-YS: Mentorship InterviewIFCC
  • TF-YS report at Asia-Pacific Congress of Clinical Biochemistry – APFCB 2019

CONTRIBUTE TO IFCC eNEWS

  • Healthcare Quality Solutions – Ready your workforce for Quality
  • Six-month extension to apply for a 2020 Healthcare Excellence Team Award
  • Uplifting the medical lab cybersecurity

NEWS FROM REGIONAL FEDERATIONS AND MEMBER SOCIETIES

  • News from the Bolivian Society of Clinical Biochemistry (SOBOBIOCLI)
  • News from Turkey: the joint Congress of BCLF and TBS
  • News from France: LABAC

NEWS IFCC Members

  • Georgian Medical Laboratory Association (GLMA)
  • Zhejiang Kuake Biotechnology Co., Ltd.
  • Labtronic

IFCC’s CALENDAR OF CONGRESSES, CONFERENCES & EVENTS

  • Calendar of IFCC Congresses/Conferences and Regional Federations’ Congresses
  • Calendar of events with IFCC auspices

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Flip version

Containing new coronavirus may not be feasible, experts say, as they warn of possible sustained global spread

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BETSY JOLES/GETTY IMAGES

ome infectious disease experts are warning that it may no longer be feasible to contain the new coronavirus circulating in China. Failure to stop it there could see the virus spread in a sustained way around the world and even perhaps join the ranks of respiratory viruses that regularly infect people.

“The more we learn about it, the greater the possibility is that transmission will not be able to be controlled with public health measures,” said Dr. Allison McGeer, a Toronto-based infectious disease specialist who contracted SARS in 2003 and who helped Saudi Arabia control several hospital-based outbreaks of MERS.

If that’s the case, she said, “we’re living with a new human virus, and we’re going to find out if it will spread around the globe.” McGeer cautioned that because the true severity of the outbreak isn’t yet known, it’s impossible to predict what the impact of that spread would be, though she noted it would likely pose significant challenges to health care facilities.

The pessimistic assessment comes from both researchers studying the dynamics of the outbreak — the rate at which cases are rising in and emerging from China — and infectious diseases experts who are parsing the first published studies describing cases to see if public health tools such as isolation and quarantine could as effective in this outbreak as they were in the 2003 SARS epidemic.

And the warnings come as the United States reported over the weekend finding three more cases, the country’s third, fourth, and fifth. Two were diagnosed in California. One is a traveler from Wuhan, where the outbreak is believed to have started, who was diagnosed in Orange County. The other is someone who visited Wuhan who was diagnosed in Los Angeles County. The fifth case was diagnosed in Arizona and is a student at Arizona State University; the person had also traveled to Wuhan.

Confirmed infections within China climbed to nearly 2,750 and the death toll rose to 80.

China’s health minister, Ma Xiaowei, warned Sunday that the virus seems to be becoming more transmissible and the country — which has taken unprecedentedly draconian steps to control the virus — was entering a “crucial stage.”

China’s actions — which include shutting off flights and trains from some affected cities and effectively putting tens of millions of people into quarantine — may not be enough to stop the virus, experts said.

“Despite the enormous and admirable efforts in China and around the world, we need to plan for the possibility containment of this epidemic isn’t possible,” said Neil Ferguson, an infectious diseases epidemiology at Imperial College London who has issued a series of modeling studies on the outbreak.

There may be as many as 100,000 cases already in China, Ferguson told The Guardian newspaper on Sunday, adding the model suggests the number could be between 30,000 and 200,000 cases. “Almost certainly many tens of thousands of people are infected,” he told the British newspaper.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced Sunday it is donating $10 million to the response to the virus. Half the money will be given to Chinese groups to help them in containment efforts. The other half will be given to the African Center for Disease Control to fund its efforts to help African countries prepare to have to cope with the new infection.

Also on Sunday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted that he is traveling to Beijing to meet with Chinese authorities to offer support and to learn more about the outbreak.

The WHO so far has not declared the outbreak a global health emergency, though Tedros, as he is know, has said the spread of the new virus is a crisis for China and a risk to countries beyond it. The WHO declined to label the outbreak a global health emergency of international concern on the advice of a panel of experts who met Wednesday and Thursday, though those experts were split on whether a PHEIC should be declared.

This outbreak is caused by a virus — currently known as 2019-nCoV — that belongs to the same family as the viruses that caused the SARS outbreak and which cause sporadic flare-ups of cases of MERS on the Arabian Peninsula.

The SARS virus caused an explosive outbreak in late 2002 and early 2003, infecting more than 8,000 people around the globe and killing nearly 800 before it was contained. MERS has never caused a sustain global outbreak, though a number of large hospital-based outbreaks — including one in South Korea sparked by a businessman who contracted the virus in the Middle East — have been recorded.

One of the luckiest breaks the world got with the SARS outbreak was the fact that the virus did not transmit before people developed symptoms.

With some diseases, like influenza and measles, people who are infected but who are not yet feeling sick — people who are still going to work or school, taking public transit, shopping in malls, or going to movies — can pass the viruses to others.

Tools like quarantine and isolation — which were key to controlling SARS — are unlikely stop spread of a virus that can transmit during the period from infection to symptoms, experts say.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the agency knows transmission of the virus within the United States may be on the horizon.

“We’re leaning far forward. And we have been every step of the way with an aggressive stance to everything we can do in the U.S.,” she told STAT. “And yet those of us who have been around long enough know that everything we do might not be enough to stop this from spreading in the U.S.”

To date, at least 14 countries and territories outside of mainland China have reported nearly 60 cases. There have been no reports yet of unchecked spreading from those imported cases to others.

“In hours where I’m feeling optimistic I think about the fact that none of the other countries, including the U.S., have seen significant sustained chains of transmission,” Messonnier said. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s not coming.”

It also appears that the incubation time — the time from infection to the development of symptoms — may be a bit shorter than that of SARS, McGeer said, citing a paper published Friday that described transmission within a family in Hong Kong. With SARS, most people developed symptoms about four or five days after infection, she said.

A short incubation period gives health authorities less time to track down and quarantine people who have been exposed to the virus and who are en route to becoming infectious.

Scientists who have been studying the genetic sequences of viruses from China and a few other of the countries that have recorded cases have calculated what is known as the reproductive rate of this outbreak — the number of people, on average, that each case will infect.

An outbreak with a reproductive number of below 1 will peter out. But a number of groups have calculated a reproductive rate for this current outbreak — known by the term R-naught or R0 — in the range of 2 to 3 or beyond.

Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, suggested the estimates are sobering and point to continued spread.

“If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic,” Bedford said, though he cautioned that it’s impossible to know at this point how severe that type of event would be.

Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, urged countries to start planning to deal with global spread of the new virus. Such plans need to include far more aggressive efforts to develop a vaccine than have already been announced, he suggested.

“I’m not making a prediction that it’s going to happen,” Inglesby said, though he noted the mathematical modeling, the statements from Chinese authorities, and the sharply rising infection numbers make a case for this possible outcome. “I think just based on those pieces of limited information, it’s important for us to begin some planning around the possibility that this won’t be contained.”

Author: Helen Branswell, Senior Writer, Infectious Disease

Source: statnews.com

LabQuality 2020: International Congress on Quality in Laboratory Medicine

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6 – 7 February 2020. Helsinki, Finland.

The theme for the 2020 congress is Optimizing the Quality and Use of Laboratory Results.

Optimizing the quality and use of laboratory results

The scientific program of the next International Congress on Quality in Laboratory Medicine will be built around the theme of optimizing quality. The program will cover topics on harmonization of medical practices, how to communicate the results to clinicians and patients, and quality assurance of new measurement technologies.
https://www.labqualitydays.fi/en/scientific-program/

ePoster Exhibition

The ePoster exhibition – a modern tool to present your data and latest scientific results to an international audience. Please register and submit your abstract for the ePoster exhibition as soon as possible. Delegates presenting an ePoster at the congress will receive a discount on the registration fee.

Web page: labqualitydays.fi

[PODCAST] Prof. Khosrow Adeli: New Year

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Professor Adeli is currently the Head of Clinical Biochemistry at the Hospital for Sick Children and the Vice-Chair of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. He is also a senior scientist in Molecular Medicine at the Research Institute, The Hospital for Sick Children. He is very well known for his extensive national and international contributions over the past 30 years to clinical laboratory service, research, and education.

Prof. Khosrow Adeli, IFCC President Elect, wishes IFCC family a happy new year.

IFCC WorldLab Seoul 2020

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The 24th International Congress of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC WorldLab Seoul 2020) will be held at Coex, Seoul, Korea from May 24 to 28, 2020. Since the first IFCC congress in 1954, the main goal of the congress has been the globalization of medical knowledge related to Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine through a well-structured system of continuing education.

The IFCC WorldLab Seoul 2020 Organizing Committee is gearing up for an exciting and informative symposium program including plenary lectures, educational workshops, satellite meetings and poster sessions. Under the theme, “Value-based Laboratory Medicine”, IFCC WorldLab Seoul 2020 will offer a highly dynamic and stimulating scientific program and be a great occasion to gather together to discuss emerging issues and cutting-edge techniques coming from the field of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine.

Dates to focus on:

  • 15 January 2020: Deadline for abstract submission
  • 31 March 2020: Deadline for reduced registration fees

Read more: www.seoul2020.org/2020

IFCC Calls for Nominations

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Applications for these positions should be submitted by IFCC members (National Societies or Corporate members). If you are interested, please refer to your National Representative or Corporate Representative for information on procedures for nominations. Find your representative HERE

For further information on the open Calls for Nominations, please visit the IFCC Call for Nominations page.

Education and Management Division 

  • Executive Committee (EMD-EC): one member position as of January 2020.
    Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 15th December 2019.
    Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org).
  • Committee on Clinical Applications of Cardiac – Biomarkers (C-CB): one member position as of January 2020.
    Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 31st December 2019.
    Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org).
  • Committee on Distance Learning (C-DL): two members positions as of January 2020.Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 8th January 2020.
    Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org).
  • Committee on Clinical Molecular Biology Curriculum (C-CMBC): two members positions as of January 2020. Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 15th January 2020. Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org).
  • Committee on Analytical Quality (C-AQ): one member position as of January 2020.
    Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 22nd January 2020.
    Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org).
  • Committee on Evidence-based Laboratory Medicine (C-EBLM): one member position as of year 2020. Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 29th January 2020.
    Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org).
  • Committee on Clinical Laboratory Management (C-CLM): one member position as of year 2020. Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 5th February 2020.
    Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org).

Congresses and Congresses Committee

  • Congresses and Congresses Committee: one member position as of January 2020.
    Deadline to receive nominations and supporting documents is 10th January 2020.
    Nominations should be sent directly to Silvia Cardinale at the IFCC office (cardinale@ifcc.org)

Más información: www.ifcc.org/executive-board-and-council/ifcc-call-for-nominations

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