On the 23rd of September, Albert Eisenbarth defended his thesis at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the Tübingen!
Examiners were Prof. Peschel, Prof. Betz, PD Streit, PD Renz.
Eisenbarth-Promotionsvortrag-Abstract
On September, 9th, the Regional Center of the Ministry of Research and Innovation (Ministère de la Recherche et d’Innovation) invited, on the occasion of the promotion of Dr. Manchang, Chercheur et Chef de Programme Santé Animale de l’IRAD, to a conference on the “Lutte contre l’onchocercose humaine’.
PD Dr. Alfons Renz was invited to summarize his 39 years of onchocerciasis research in Cameroon:
After the talk of Renz and Manchang the guests were invited for an African dinner and for an interview by the Camerouonian TV-channel 2
In August 2015, Manchang Kingsley Tanya from IRAD Wakwa finished his PhD in Münster with Prof. Eva Liebau. During the DFG-Secretome project he had worked in the laboratory of PD. Dr. Minka Breloer at the Bernhard-Nocht-Institut in Hamburg on the immuno-stimulating and immune-suppressive action of filarial nematode antigens. (2009-2012; Promotion 2015) : Onchocerca ochengi-derived excretory/secretory products: immune response and immune modulation.
The Afrika-Festival Tübingen 2015 has started!
The Programme Onchocercoses team presents its activities in the ‘Cameroon village’. 19 pagode tents are grouped together to represent Cameroon, which shall be the country in focus of this year’s festival.
http://www.afrikafestival-reutlingen.de/en/
Start of the Festival on Thursday: Situated close o the ntrance of the ‘Cameroon Village’, our tent shall be the first to be seen by the visitors when they enter the village. However and unfortunately, the guests from Cameroon had not received their visa in time!! The German Embassy in Yaounde had not benn capable to grant them the visa necessary for travel to Germany. This was true as well for the guests of the festival as for our four students from Cameroon, which we had invited. These students from the universities of Ngaoundéré and Bamenda should have participated in the presentation of the Programme Onchocercoases project. Then, starting on Monday, they were expected to participate in a two wekks workshop on new molecular techniques in medical entomology, held by Albert Eisenbarth and Babette Guimbang.
On Friday, the Africa-Business-Meeting and Embasadors Talk to place in a large tent on the festival. Mr. Otto Erbe, head of the Industrie und Handelskammer welcommed the guests and introduced the speakers. After the talk, his Excellency Jean-Marc Mpay, Embasssador of Cameroon to Germany and his wife visited the Programme Onchocercoses presentation. They highly appreciated the work done in collaboration with IRAD and the universities of Bamenda and Ngaoundéré and had a long talk with Ms Babette Guimbang, who recently had received a teach-at-tübingen grant.
On Friday evening, a heavy thunder-storm went over the festival and forced the visitors to refugee under the tents.
On Saturday however, a very heavy storm sadly forced us to finish our exhibition. Many tents were destroyed.
In summary, we had a strong and interesting presentation at the festival, which this year was extremely well prepared by the organisors. Unfortunately, the Cameroon Village was left deserted because of the problems in obtaining the visa for the representatives of Cameroon.
More pictures from the festival on the homepage of the local newspaper: http://www.tagblatt.de/Home/bilder/bilder-lokales_autoplay,1_mmid,5797.html#454092
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We are more than happy to announce that the Baden-Württemberg-Stiftung is going to support the strategic partnership of the University of Tübingen with Cameroonian Partners from the University of Bamenda, University of Ngaoundéré and the Institute for Agricultural Research (IRAD) in Yaoundé!
This grant shall allow the exchange of students, organization of workshops in Tübingen and Cameroon and presentation of our collaboration the the Afrika-Festival and Business-Meetings in Tübingen!
Africa not only is a continent badly sufferering from neglected tropical diseases but also from all kind of compter viruses. Recently two of your students from the University of Ngaoundéré lost many data and much work by an infection of their laptops. When talking to this with a representative of the software-developing company ACRONIS they kindly prosed helping us with a sending of their package: ACRONIS True Image – PC Backup & Recovery. The sending just arrived when our partners were here in Tübingen and was well received with thanks!
DFG-COBE partners met in Tübingen on the 15th and 16th of June to discuss the ongoing progress and plan for the future years. The Director-General OF IRAD, Yaoundé, came to Tübingen for the first time and representatives of our project were wellcomed on behalf of the recorate by the Prorector of reseach of the university, Prof. Grathwohl. 
The this year’s meeting of the German-African reserach projects in Infectiology took place at the Biozentrum of the university Würzburg. Our project was presented by Ms Babette Guimbang and by two posters. The excursion took us to the historic town of Bamberg.
Emmanuela Anandarajah and Dana Ditgen from the helminthiasis-immunology-lab of PD Dr. Norbert Brattig came to the Programme Onchocercoses laboratory in Ngaoundéré to focus on gastro-intestinal helminths of cattle. During their 5-weeks stay, they shall, in collaboration with the colleagues from IRAD-Wakwa, identify the variety of nematodes found in the gut of cattle in Nord-Cameroon, in particular with a view to the prevalence of such worms in our herd of 60 cattle, kept at the river Vina du Sud. The excretory-secretory products of such concomittant helminth infestations almost surely must affect the outcome of the various filarial infections (Onchocerca ochengi, O. gutturosa, O. armillata etc., that we observe building up in these study animals.
Dipl. biol. Alexander Schinko, who has been in Cameroon already during our students excursion in the last year, has come back to the project in January. He is an entomologist and wanted to aid in the studies on the vectorial efficiency of local Simulium damnosum s.l. flies and in the production of O. ochengi infective larvae, needed for in-vitro studies (PhD student Nancy Nwasiri). Alex also went to visit our partners in Bamenda and welcomed our colleagues from the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute (Hamburg) that came to work in the COBE-project on intestinal nematode worms (see next posting). He stayed in Ngaoundéré until almost the end of February 2015 and since is no longer part of the team.
