The two-day conference on Infectious Diseases organised by Manipal McGill Centre for Infectious Diseases (MACID), along with Department of Medicine, Kasturba Medical College Manipal, McGill Global Health Programmes and T.M.A. Pai Endowment Chair in Translational Epidemiology, which concluded here recently, discussed a whole gamut of issues related to infectious diseases. Detection, diagnosis, outbreak, investigation and other related matters came up for discussion by speakers both from India and overseas.
A statement issued by Manipal University said that the conference, attended by close to 200 faculty members, postgraduate students and researchers, was inaugurated by H. Vinod Bhat, Vice-Chancellor, Manipal University. He hoped that in the coming years, MACID would take up advocacy and policy issues to have the needed impact on reducing infectious diseases mortality in India.
Chandrasekar, Chief of Infectious Diseases from Wayne State University, Detroit, delivered the keynote address on recent advances in the diagnostics of fungal infections for earlier diagnosis to reduce mortality.
Madhukar Pai from McGill University, Montreal, spoke about the need for an Essential Diagnostics List. Such a list could be helpful in improving patient care, detecting outbreaks, increasing affordability of tests, reducing out-of-pocket expenses for tests, reducing antibiotic abuse and guiding research and development of new diagnostic tools, he said.