The 44th annual IDSA meeting in Toronto was successful by all measures

November 2006

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America is now history, and a very successful meeting it was.

Several factors combined to make this such a successful meeting, in my judgment. First, it was held in Toronto, and Toronto is always a delightful and cosmopolitan city to visit. Although I don’t think it was a first for the IDSA to meet outside of the United States, it is a city the society could well visit more often. I suspect Vancouver could fall into the same category. The weather was generally favorable, and Toronto was spared the 2 feet of snow that paralyzed Buffalo, not more than 60 miles away.

Second, Arturo Casadevall and his program committee put together a nicely balanced program of state-of-the-art named lectureships (all of which were excellent), clinical symposia that attracted mostly infectious disease practitioners, and scientific presentations, both oral and poster.

Although the program committee put together the program, it was still very much the president’s meeting, in the person of Marty Blaser, MD. That is a point of some local pride, since Blaser received his training in both internal medicine and infectious disease with us at the University of Colorado.

Meeting themes

The major themes of the meeting did not change appreciably from the past several years, but there has been continuing evolution. Community-associated MRSA, Clostridium difficile toxinotype III, HIV/AIDS, nosocomial infection issues, multidrug resistant gram-negative bacilli, and food-borne infection – all the regular players were present.

There were several new themes as well. First was a much stronger emphasis on the global responsibilities we face as infectious disease physicians in a resource-rich country, when over a third of all deaths in the world are still caused by treatable infectious diseases, notably tuberculosis, malaria, and, of course, HIV-AIDS. That theme was first enunciated by Julie Gerberding, MD, MPH, in the opening session, and then amplified the following morning by Allan Ronald, MD, in his Smadel Lecture, and again by Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, on Saturday morning in the Kass lecture. As the years go by, and these issues remain the problems they are today, that theme will become more and more insistent.

The new Lyme disease treatment guidelines received a lot of attention, since they had been released just prior to the meeting. Topics covered during the session on “Clinical Controversies in Infectious Diseases” included sperm-washing for HIV-discordant couples, whether or not vancomycin should be considered obsolete by now and the duration of treatment for proven Lyme Disease. The latter topic consisted of a presentation by Paul Auwaerter, MD, from Johns Hopkins, presenting the “conservative” IDSA position, and one by Raphael Stricker, MD, the president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. He had some points to make as well, and this discussion will be the subject of an article in a subsequent issue of Infectious Disease News.

One of the most poignant moments I can remember at an IDSA meeting occurred when Merle Sande, MD, was awarded the Alexander Fleming Award for Lifetime Achievement (formerly known as the Bristol Award). His friends would have understood completely if Merle had opted to stay in Seattle and receive the award in absentia. Not Merle. Quite courageously, Merle opted to fly across the continent and, with a major effort, walk up to the dais to receive the award in person, to the sustained applause of all. Such is his devotion to the IDSA. One hopes his brief comments will not constitute a valedictory.