The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), in partnership with the Public Health Authority and Ministry of Health, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have announced the biennial Quadripartite Global Technical Meeting on MERS-CoV and Other Emerging Zoonotic Coronaviruses. The meeting will be by invitation and take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on 27–29 November 2023.
The meeting will bring together public health officials, researchers, resource partners, and industrial partners across the global community to share the latest findings from accelerated efforts to implement the MERS-CoV public health research agenda and research and development roadmap, with a strong emphasis on a One Health approach and integrating relevant work on other emerging zoonotic coronaviruses as well.
Although the response to SARS-CoV-2 has dominated the public health agenda since its emergence in late 2019, the threat posed by MERS-CoV remains significant. It is crucial to continue to advance knowledge of MERS-CoV to respond effectively to future outbreaks of this pathogen and other emerging zoonotic coronaviruses.
To shape the meeting agenda, the Quadripartite is calling for any new or ongoing research or information from 2019 onwards as an abstract or short summary related to the following themes:
MERS-CoV
- Early warning frameworks, including surveillance, risk assessments, One Health/integrated sampling (e.g., recent seroprevalence studies in humans or dromedary camels, genetic sequencing of human or animal specimen, etc.);
- Applied predictive modelling (e.g. transmission, ecological, risk of spillover, etc.);
- Advances in diagnostics and therapeutics;
- Advances in scientific knowledge, including:
- Virology (e.g. differences in viral strains, etc.);
- Immunology (e.g. the role of immunity in acquiring infection and shedding virus, etc.);
- Pathogenicity;
- Epidemiology and transmissibility among humans, among camels and between humans and camels;
- Environmental, behavioral or host-related risk factors for zoonotic transmission;
- Investigations into the role of asymptomatic human cases in the spread of MERS-CoV in community or healthcare settings;
- Vaccine development (e.g. status of the progress and provisional timelines of vaccine trials in both humans and camels);
- Advances on establishing coordination mechanisms among sectors for prevention and control of MERS-CoV and or other emerging zoonotic coronaviruses (e.g. information or data sharing platforms, joint research, joint risk assessment, etc.).
Additional themes related to animal health and camel sectors
- Applied research and/or practices of community engagement as related to health, economic or market development, risk communication (e.g. drivers and opportunities of engagement);
- Participatory research including participatory epidemiology, surveillance, etc.
- Behaviour sciences and adaptive behaviour research (e.g. camel-husbandry related practices, anthropological studies, etc.).
SARS-CoV-2 and other emerging zoonotic coronaviruses
- One Health risk assessments;
- Hotspot and risk mapping;
- Interface surveillance;
- Pathogen ranking/prioritization;
- Cross-protective immunity.
Examples include, but are not limited to, abstracts of peer-reviewed publications or pre-printed manuscripts, posters, summaries of preliminary findings from research in progress, etc.
Responses to this call can be sent to Sophie von Dobschuetz, WHO MERS-CoV Technical Lead, and Gisella Dias, FAO Veterinary Epidemiologist in an email with the subject “MERS-CoV Call for Information 2023”.
The deadline for submissions is 31 August 2023.
