Lucille Hellen Blumberg

Talk Title: One health, many emerging pathogens

Professor Lucille Blumberg is an infectious diseases physician and medical microbiologist. She is the former deputy director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, South Africa (2003- 2015) where she was the founding head of the Centre for Public Health Surveillance and Response and consultant to the Centre for Emerging, Zoonotic and Parasitic Diseases. In 2020 she established the national DATCOV programme for surveillance for COVID-19 which collected and analysed on hospitalized patients (private and public sector) and provided data to guide prevention and treatment policies for COVID-19. she was the vice chair of the WHO review committee for the performance of IHR during the COVID-19 pandemic. She currently has honorary appointments at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, the Universities of Stellenbosch (medical microbiology) and the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her focus is on outbreak prevention and response, emerging diseases, travel- related infections, the viral haemorrhagic fevers, malaria and zoonosis especially rabies. She is the current chair of the Strategic Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards for the WHO Emergencies Programme and a member a member of the scientific advisory group for the WHO Neglected Tropical Diseases programme. She is a long-standing member of the National Rabies Advisory Group in South and is the previous chair of the South African Malaria Elimination Committee (SAMEC). Prof Blumberg has been involved in the prevention, detection and responses to a number of communicable disease outbreaks including cholera, typhoid, rabies, the Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers (Lujo, Rift Valley fever, Ebola), influenza (pandemic A H1N1 09, and Avian influenza A H5N2 and diphtheria. Her special interests are in malaria, rabies and other zoonoses. East African trypanosomiasis, travel and tropical medicine and border health issues. She has worked with Right to Care as a technical scientific advisor since 2021.