Impact of Environmental Changes on Infectious Diseases – Innovative Responses

3-5 June 2020

James Cook University Campus, Singapore

IECID 2020 is the third meeting in the series and builds upon two previous and highly successful meetings in 2015 and 2017. The conference provides a forum for showcasing current research and findings in the field, as well as for identifying future research challenges and highlighting the inter-disciplinary approaches needed to meet them.

Environmental (including climate) variations are linked to the (re)emergence and changes in the distribution and epidemic potential of several important infectious diseases. In some cases, the links are relatively straightforward, involving the exposure of naïve populations of humans and other biological taxa to unfamiliar pathogens. In other cases, relationships are confounded, such as by the movements of people, by ecological disturbance, by drugs resistance or by weakened immunity, for example due to co-infection and/or malnutrition. These increasingly significant health challenges are driving innovative responses involving emerging technologies as well as new approaches, systems and inter-disciplinary partnerships, in the process opening-up new avenues for research and effective preventative, diagnostic and mitigation measures.

Plenary lectures will open each day followed by round table discussions, parallel sessions and large poster sessions.

Abstracts are invited by 17 January 2020 for consideration as talks and posters on the following conference topics:

• Climate change & infectious diseases (including vector borne diseases)
• Extreme events/disaster preparedness (including heat waves, storms, floods)
• Environmental change, zoonoses and co-infection
• Food-borne diseases
• New environments and new biosecurity risks
• Urbanisation
• New innovations in citizens’ involvement in mitigating/avoiding infectious disease outbreaks in a rapidly changing world
• Land use change, food security and infectious diseases
• Biodiversity and infectious diseases
• Water-borne diseases/aquatic hazards & environmental change
• Neglected and emerging diseases & environmental change
• Weekly to seasonal prediction and early warning of climate-sensitive disease risk

Innovation in inter-disciplinary approaches and technologies will be at the core of this conference. Cross-cutting themes will include new technologies (such as big data, AI, models); integrated multi-disciplinary approaches; UN Sustainable Development Goals. Opportunities for Early Career Researchers in the exciting, dynamic field of environmental change-health relationships will be both highlighted and promoted. We recognize that the health of people, wild and domestic animals and the environment are intricately inter-connected and a One Health inter-disciplinary approach is an essential way to tackle these issues. As such new collaborative alliances will be a key goal of the conference.

Supporting publications