Conclusions of the Cape Town meeting released

The GloPID-R meeting in Cape Town on May 4 and 5 of 2015 was the opportunity to discuss general themes and very practical questions among participants contributing to the overall objective of the meeting ‘Learning from Ebola – How to respond better to the next outbreak’.

Among the themes discussed was the imbalance between the societal value of research and the low Return On Investment for the industry to carry on research in many areas (research and manufacturing costs, lead-time to develop treatments and vaccines, regulatory and social hurdles, pricing of future treatments) despite the fact that the industry is in principle well-armed to become organized quickly to react to new pathogens. The need to create a sustainable scientific capacity in Africa (as well as in other regions vulnerable to epidemics during the interepidemic period) was also stressed. It was mentioned that less than 10% of current scientific funding in Africa is local.

The meeting was dedicated to debating practical questions and solutions in relations to the Ebola outbreak, to learn what went wrong, what worked well and what are the key lessons learnt to be better prepared to the next outbreak.