Program
Program Overview
The conference is expected to begin on Monday 20 October 2008 with registration at 11am and an opening plenary at 1.00pm. The conference will be held back-to-back with the Australian Gastroenterology Week with overlap sessions on Wednesday 22 October 2008. The conference will conclude at 5pm on Wednesday 22 October 2008.
For a program overview click here.
The abstract submission deadline is Friday 18 July 2008. Abstract submission is available online now on the Abstracts page of this website.
Program Information
The theme of the conference is ‘Hepatitis B & C at the Crossroads'. The conference will aim to cover the key issues of regulations versus accepted practice, tensions around policy and practice in the harm reduction field and the need for a National Hepatitis B Strategy.
The conference will present key work in the six major streams including Basic Science; Clinical Medicine; Community Responses; Epidemiology; Public Health and Prevention; and Social Research. The Basic Science concurrent sessions will include the research work of the Principal Investigators of the Australian Centre for Hepatitis Virology.
The conference will provide a broad and in-depth coverage of hepatitis B issues. The Organising Committee calls for abstracts on a range of matters such as:
vaccination and strategies to "catch-up" where young people have not been vaccinated
identifying people at risk of HBV or at risk of progressive liver damage as a result of HBV
epidemiological studies including those in hard to reach groups, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, people from high prevalence countries and screening strategies
emerging new treatments and new treatment strategies and paradigms
basic science and our increasing understanding of the pathogenesis of HBV
coinfections and comorbidities
This conference will be held back-to-back with the Australian Gastroenterology Week (AGW), which is being held from 22 to 25 October 2008. This has enabled us to schedule a joint plenary day on Wednesday 22 October 2008 for both the delegates of this conference and the Australian Liver Association as part of AGW. This is an exciting opportunity for both sets of delegates to gain new perspectives on a range of issues from community to treatment. The focus of the joint plenary will be on hepatitis C. The format will be built around the case history of a person with hepatitis C, and follow their progress from acquisition, to living with the virus, undergoing antiviral therapy and issues around advanced liver disease. The joint plenary will provide an opportunity to develop a broad understanding of issues around hepatitis C in Australia and the region. The joint plenary will include presentations on antiviral therapy, including new agents being developed, and transplantation. It will also include sessions on injection drug use, vaccine development, the impact of living with hepatitis C, treating the current injector, increasing the donor pool for transplantation and responses from Government.
The Conference will again host a Think Tank on Access to Hepatitis C Treatment. The first Think Tank was held adjacent to the 2006 Viral Hepatitis Conference. This year the Think Tank sessions will be incorporated into the program. These will start with a presentation from an invited speaker reviewing access issues for priority populations and will look very closely at what initiatives are increasing access in local settings, nationally and from overseas. These presentations will be followed by proffered papers exploring the implications of these approaches for the health care workforce. Each session will have an allocated panel discussion. The final session on Tuesday 21 October will then look more closely at service delivery and workforce issues, including the emergence of community and nursing initiatives. The proceedings of these sessions will be published following the conference. All abstracts submitted to the Conference will be considered for inclusion in the Think Tank sessions.
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