Tübingen students in the Programme Onchocercoses Lab

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During the3 semester holiday 2015, three students from the Tübingen university visited the Programme Onchoceroses Laboratory in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon. They had participated in the Cameroon-seminar at the university of Tübingen and the course on ‘Vektorbiologie & Epidemiuologie’ in the Sommersaemester 2015:

Francois Korbmacher: His aim was to search for pathogens in local ticks on cattle (Amblyomma variegatum and Boophilus decoloratus, mainly).

Sophia Stiegler: She injected microfilariae of bovine Onchocerca species into local Simulium flies to follow-up their develoopment to infective L3 larvae.

Freya Zettl: She takes movies of moving microfilariae in different media to analyse the specific movements of various Onchocerca species isolated from the skin of cattle and from the uterus of gravid female worms.

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hotos of their work are shown in the galerie.

Programme Onchocercoses at the Tuebingen Afrika-Festival

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Programme Onchoceroses made a debut presentation at the Afrika-Festival 2014, which took place in Tübingen from July 17th to 20. Lots of visitors came to our tent, amongst the many, his Excellency, the Ambassador of Cameroon in Berlin, Jean-Marc Mpay, the Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister for Economic Coooperation and Development Hans-Joachim Fuchtel and the German Chancellor’s G8 Personal Representative for Africa, Mr. Günter Nooke, and the former German Ambassador to the Rupublik of Cameroon, Horst Buchholz.

Under a microcope, kindly provided by the ZEISS-Microimaging compagny, we showed Onchocerca-worms and Simulium-vector flies. The results of 37 years of fieldwork in Cameroon, as well as our on-going research topics were presented by posters (=> see more)

Can cattle protect from blindness? – the answer to this this was a threefold  yes, in deed: By zooprophylaxis and crossprotecting premunition. Moreover, the bovine Onchocerca ochengi provides us a marvellous experimental tool for studies of the biology of filarial worms, developing new macrofilaricides and vaccines. By this, bovine onchocercosis opens our eyes to understand the epidemiology of human riverblindness.

The festival was also an occasion to meet old friends and colleagues, like Dr. Dr. Christoph Jacobi, who now runs a project of AIDS-pervention in Buea, Cameroon, and Dr. Wolfgang Hoffmann from the Tübingen Institute for Tropical Medicine, who presented his work on rodent filarial worms.

The DIFÄM (Deutsches Institut für Ärztliche Mission) and the AIDS-Hilfe, both in Tübingen presented their information-flyers for distribution.

See more: http://www.afrikafestival.net

=> Press-releases (Schwäbisches Tagblatt):

AfrikaFestival-2014-Ankuendigung-ST-komp;AfrikaFestival-2014-Wirtschaftsforum-ST-komp; AfrikaFestival-2014-Reggae-Kochbananen-ST-komp

DFG Partners meet in Dar es Salaam

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Reserachers from over 30 research projects present their ongoing studies on the epidemiology and control of neglected infectious diseases in Africa. Part of the German-Africam research-cooperation is our project on human and bovine onchocerciasis.

The meeting takes place at the White Sands beach hotel 20 km north of Dar es Salaam.