Ninth International Congress on Toxoplasmosis

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The Ninth International Congress on Toxoplasmosis will be held in June/July 2007 in Chico Hot Springs, Montana. This is an international research conference dedicated to the protozoan pathogen Toxoplasma gondii. The meeting has been held biannually for the last 20 years and switches between Europe and the United States. The 2007 conference will be organized by Drs. Silvia Moreno, Michael White and Boris Striepen. Toxoplasma gondii is an important cause of opportunistic infection in AIDS patients. This parasite also frequently causes congenital infection and it is estimated that one out of a thousand pregnancies in the U.S. is complicated by toxoplasmosis. T. gondii is also considered a potential bioterrorism threat (appendix B) due to its ability to cause waterborne outbreaks. Lastly, T. gondii has emerged as a genetically tractable model organism to study the biology and pathogenesis of several important human and veterinary parasites including Plasmodium (malaria), Babesia, Theileria, Cryptosporidium (appendix B pathogen), Cyclospora, Neospora, Eimeria, and Isospora. This meeting is important in that it gathers all of the laboratories working on T. gondii and allows for the exchange of new ideas and approaches both on a formal and informal level. Participants come from allover the world (Europe, US, South America, Australia, Japan) and the meeting brings together molecular biologists, clinicians, industry researchers and public health officials. The goals of the meeting are to disseminate new advances in the field, highlight the importance of T. gondii as a model system, foster collaboration and field-wide initiatives, and to introduce new or younger investigators to the leaders in the field. This meeting has fostered an environment of cooperation and collaboration in work on T. gondii that is not often seen in fields as high paced and competitive and has facilitated rapid and sustained progress in research on this pathogen and related parasites.