ISTM News

Committee Reports

Exam Committee

Almost 500 examinees sat for the Certificate of Travel Health (CTH) examination in Vancouver in May. Examinees included travel health professionals from countries around the world, including Nigeria, Angola, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Slovenia and Hong Kong, to name a few. Overall, the CTH examination has thus far attracted about 1200 examinees. Comments and a survey demonstrated that the examination and CTH are becoming more broadly appreciated and utilized. Feedback from awardees has included a sense of enhanced professional development, added credibility to the practice, improved marketing capacity for the clinic, and boosted knowledge and acceptance of Travel Medicine as a specialty. The standard for the practice of travel medicine is being defined and the credibility that the CTH gives to the specialty is growing.

The Certificate Examination will be administered next in Melbourne, Australia just prior to the opening of the Asia Pacific conference. Please see the ISTM web site for information updates regarding registration.

Sincerely,

Phyllis Kozarsky - USA (Chair), Jesse Alves - Brazil, Paul Arguin - USA, Brian Aw - Canada, Buddha Basynat - Nepal, Neville Byrne - United Kingdom, Bradley Connor - USA, Philip Coyne - USA, Ken Dardick - USA, Fabio Foti - Italy, Fiona Genasi - United Kingdom, Martin Haditsch - Austria, David Hamer - USA, Pierre Landry - Switzerland, Sonny Lau - Australia, Lisa Libassi - USA, Susan MacDonald - China, Mikio Kimura - Japan, Marc Robin - USA, Eli Schwartz - Israel, David Shlim - USA, Alan Spira - USA, Steve Toovey - South Africa, Alfons van Gompel - Belgium.

Research Committee

2007 Research Awards Announced at CISTM10. The ISTM Research Committee takes great pleasure in announcing the successful award applicants for 2007. Two of the project applications were rated highest, and a total of 13,000USD was awarded. The successful projects are:

Developing the Nursing Pre-Travel Health Consultation. Adrienne Willcox, UK; 7,000 USD

Global Health Drug Information Hotline for Travelers. Caroline S. Zeind, USA; 6,000 USD

Presentation by 2005 Reward Recipient. One other highlight was the oral abstract presentation of 2005 awardees Daniel Ulsan and Abinash Virk entitled International travel and exposure risks in solid-organ transplant recipients.

Poster Presentation by the Research Priority Setting Working Group. An outstanding initiative led by Elizabeth Talbot, Christopher Sanford, and Lin Chen - with limited support from Anne McCarthy - provided a review of literature and survey to try to establish travel medicine research priorities. The poster included an invitation for ISTM members to rate the research priorities; results should be published in the not too distant future.

Christopher Sandford, Anne McCarthy and Lin Chen at the Research Priority Setting Working Group poster, CISTM. Missing Elizabeth Talbot.

Successful collaborative research by the Clinical Trails Network. Congratulations to Dr Charlie Ericsson who successfully completed his multicenter pre-travel survey on prevention of travelers' diarrhea, entitled Travelers' Preferences for the Management of Diarrhea. The study was designed to engage members of the Clinical Trials Network to participate in a multinational study. We look forward to the manuscript!

N Melgarejo, A McCarthy and C Ericsson at their poster, missing T Jelinek.

Start planning for 2008 ISTM Research Award Competition. The grant application will be available on the ISTM website in the fall. Application deadline is 31 March, 2008. Results will be announced in May 2008.

The ISTM research committee fosters research in travel medicine, in keeping with the mission and goals of the society. The committee provides moderate grants (usually $5000- $10,000 maximum) through a peer-reviewed process. These grants are designed to stimulate travel medicine research by supporting comprehensive research projects or, for larger projects, providing support for pilot studies to enable researchers to collect data/tests hypotheses so that they can then apply to other agencies for more substantive research grants.

The research committee chair would once again like to thank the hard work of the committee: Anne McCarthy, Canada (Chair); Irmgard Bauer, Australia (Co-Chair); Pat Schlagenhauf, Switzerland; Annelies Wilder- Smith, Singapore; Susan McLellan, USA; Dr. Pamela Rendi-Wagner, Austria; Christie Reed, USA; Lin Chen, USA; Elizabeth Talbot, USA; Christopher Sanford, USA. The Clinical Trials Network consists of Charles Ericsson, USA; Tomas Jelinek, Germany; and Anne McCarthy.

Publication Committee

We are pleased to announce that our Journal of Travel Medicine impact factor for 2006 is 1.333, which is slightly higher than it was the year before. I think we should all be proud of the progress of our journal, which is clearly the leader in its field. Of course, we want to do even better. So authors are encouraged to submit their cutting edge research and interesting review articles to JTM and to quote JTM articles whenever possible in their submissions to JTM and other journals.

The Publication Committee (PC) chair will continue to lead the Task Force for the Development of Evidence Bases. We are also pleased to report that the generation of our first evidence base for the practice of clinical travel medicine is well underway, thanks to the leadership of past president and Associate Editor, Herbert DuPont. The topics of the first project are the treatment and prevention of travelers' diarrhea.

We envision an evidence base on personal protective measures (PPM). Anyone interested in serving on or leading the writing panel for PPM should contact Dr. Ericsson at charles.d.ericsson@uth.tmc.edu. This effort is off to a slow start owing to the inability of the assigned chair to find the necessary time. Another chair is currently being sought.

A major preoccupation over the last two years has been the transition of our journal to Blackwell then the takeover of Blackwell by Wiley. The PC has also advised the JTM editor on policy concerning length of articles and ethical participation by editorial board members in evidence base generation. The PC will continue to approve requests for use of logo and/or International Society of Travel Medicine name in print, video or web-based material.

Finally, our publisher will soon circulate a survey from JTM editor, Robert Steffen, about what our members like or dislike about JTM and what they might like to see changed or improved. It is not a long survey. Please give it some thought and we encourage all ISTM members to respond so that we have a strong representation of what our society prefers.

Likewise, if anyone has interest in serving on the Publications Committee, please let us know!

Charles D. Ericsson, MD, Chair, Ashley Croft, Doug Quarry, Graham Fry, Hans Dieter Nothdurft, Israel Potasman, Jane Chiodini, Jeffrey Goad, Joseph Torresi, Matthias Schmid, Steven Denny, Stephen Toovey

Journal of Travel Medicine - Editors' Report

The past year (since the Edinburgh report) brought mainly good news. First, (as already mentioned), the JTM impact factor rose from 0.846 to 1.33. The number of manuscripts submitted is on a steady increase, allowing the Editor to reject a greater proportion of manuscripts to increase the scientific level. We still need more reviews to be successful on the trail to an even higher impact factor. Also the time lags between submission and acceptance were slightly reduced, but that needs to be further improved.

In view of a backlog of articles we have various options. We can become even more `picky', we can increase the number of editorial pages in Volume 14, or we can consider publishing more issues - which as our Secretary/Treasurer recently stated would increase the net cost to the Society. That needs to be discussed - but my proposal is that we should increase the number of published articles. Of course we want to further raise the quality of JTM (and its impact factor), but we can hardly reject many more than 30% of the manuscripts without angering our membership.

So far, we have felt no complications from the Wiley-Blackwell merger; collaboration with our partners at the publisher without any interruption has been excellent. The only notable mishap was a misunderstanding between various involved parties that resulted in publication of an original article with a wrong title. I, for one, believe that ManuscriptCentral could be far more consumer/user friendly...

Finally let me thank: first, of course, the pillar of JTM, Gaby, assisted by her husband Niki, continues to establish most valuable relations with all the authors. She assures the continuous flow of publication of your journal. We are also most grateful to all the peer reviewers, mainly those on the Editorial Board who get a rather high load of manuscripts. Without your contribution we would get nowhere. Thank you!

Robert Steffen, Editor, JTM

Host Country Committee

ISTM Travel Grants. For the Vancouver meeting, the Host Country Committee (HCC) received twelve applications for the travel grants. Six grants at $1,500.00 were given; the successful applicants were from Cuba (1), Brazil (2), Mexico (1), India (1), and Israel (1). The following HCC members acted as judges: Michel Rey, Sheila Hall, Mario Masana Wilson Martin Haditsch and Assunta Marcolongo. Criteria used for selection included quality of presentation and research and interest of abstract for the ISTM membership.

Now that the first awards were granted, we will fine-tune and review our procedures. Publicity for the next round of awards - to be awarded at the ISTM meeting in Budapest - should start immediately and be prominently displayed on the ISTM site. Sheila Hall will liaise with the Nursing Committee to make nurses aware that these grants are also open to them. No nurses applied for the 2007 grant.

HCC proposes that to encourage new members from host countries to participate in ISTM the grant program be expanded to $20,000 to be distributed as follows: 8 international grants at $1,500 each and 16 regional grants at $500 each. A member would be able to apply for each grant category once.

Other issues:

1. A serious problem affecting host countries is sex tourism. The HCC appreciated the paper on this topic at CISTM10 in Vancouver, but feels strongly that more should be done. Should ISTM have a position on this issue? Should ISTM have links to organizations with expertise working in the field? Prominent organizations are: End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT UK at (ecpat.org.uk) and Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism (The code at thecode.org).
2. While ISTM supports the "malaria roll back" program, committee members wish to know how the support is implemented and can be enhanced.
3. Should ISTM also have links to the "Alliance for Rabies Control"?
4. A new association has recently been formed to promote medical tourism, travel for the purpose of seeking medical treatment outside one's own country. This society is called the International Medical Travel Association. This is a major issue for host countries such as India, Thailand, and for many countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, The HCC feels that ISTM should have a position in this regard especially since follow-up of medical tourists is becoming a major problem in the patient's home countries. NewShare will have an article about medical tourism in an upcoming issue.
5. HCC proposes that that some research grants, perhaps 25%, be directed to Host Country issues.
6. The "Responsible Traveler" document has been translated into ten languages by committee members and has proven very popular. The usefulness of the leaflets could be further improved if leaflets in all ten languages could be placed on the ISTM website for downloading, including a template for the smaller yellow version, which is more attractive for distribution to travelers.

The Responsible Traveler leaflets are available to all ISTM members for distribution to their travelers.

Assunta Marcolongo, Canada (chair), Santanu Chatterjee, India. Sheila Hall, Scotland, Trish Batchelor, Australia, Albie de Frey, South Africa, Irmgard Bauer, Australia, Michel Rey, France, Mikio Kimura, Japan, Mario Masana Wilson, Argentina, Buddha Basnyat, Nepal, Nebojsa Nikolic, Croatia, Marco Foltran, Brazil, Zsuzsanna Jelinek, Hungary