For more details and registration, please email Tatum Chan at chan.tatum@cityu.edu.hk
Abstract:
Coxiella burnetii is a bacteria responsible for the zoonotic disease called Q fever. The bacteria can infect all mammal species, including humans and some bird species. The bacteria, present worldwide, is usually endemic, but major outbreaks in animal and human populations struck Australia in 1993 and 2000 and The Netherlands in 2007. In this talk, I present several studies that I led at Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine (an American school delivering pre-clinical courses in the Caribbean) to investigate the risk of infection in the sheep, the veterinary students, and the farmers on the island of St. Kitts. The results confirmed that the disease is underestimated in St. Kitts, but also in the U.S.. There is a need to improve the surveillance of the disease and to increase risk awareness of veterinarians, farmers, and animal workers. Vaccination of animals and/or humans should be discussed nationally as a possible policy to prevent transmission.
Speaker’s Biography:
Dr. Anne Conan joined OHRP as Research Assistant Professor in July 2020. Dr. Conan is a veterinary epidemiologist specialized in infectious diseases in low-income area. Her main research topics are the consequences of intensification of chicken farming in Asia (One Health Poultry Hub), the epidemiology of African swine fever in South East Asia, the epidemiology of Coxiella burnetii in humans and livestock, and the control of rabies in humans and dogs. She is a research fellow at the One Health Research Foundation.
Dr. Conan completed her DVM and MSc in epidemiological surveillance in 2008. She worked at the Public Health and Epidemiology Department in Pasteur Institute in Cambodia during 5 years. Her projects focused on H5N1 avian influenza and Newcastle disease in backyard poultry flocks and on chikungunya and dengue in humans.
After completing her PhD in Epidemiology in 2013, Dr. Conan started a post-doctorate fellowship at the Department of Veterinary Tropical Diseases at the University of Pretoria (South Africa), coordinating field activities and health and demographic surveillance systems in cattle and dogs in underserved communities at the border of the Kruger National Park. She then joined Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine (St. Kitts and Nevis) in 2015 as a post-doctorate fellow before becoming an Assistant Professor in Epidemiology in 2017.