The Fourth Meeting on Vaccine Preventable Diseases (VPD) Laboratory Networks in the Western Pacific Region

The Fourth Meeting on Vaccine Preventable Diseases (VPD) Laboratory Networks (Labnet) for Poliomyelitis, Measles/Rubella and Japanese encephalitis (JE) in the Western Pacific Region was held in Manila, Philippines from 11 to 15 March 2013.

The 2nd Regional Hands-on Training Course to Implement Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction Technique for Rapid Detection and Characterization of Polioviruses was held at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine in the Philippines from 3 to 7 December 2012. This training will contribute to reducing the time needed for ITD and the frequency of shipping of virus isolates from national laboratories to the regional reference laboratories or global specialized laboratory for ITD and sequencing which consequently help to have earlier availability of ITD results of polioviruses for appropriate programme actions.

The 5th Regional Hands-on Training Workshop on the Laboratory Diagnosis of Measles and Rubella was organized at the Public Health Laboratory Center (PHLC) in Hong Kong China from 29 Oct to 3 Nov 2012 to introduce the new real time PCR techniques for measles and rubella detection and to further strengthen the genotyping capacity for both measles and rubella in the region.

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27 August-6 September 2012 - WHO conducted the on-site review of WHO regional reference polio, measles and JE laboratories in China CDC for the annual accreditation during 27-29 August 2012 and of 11 provincial polio and measles/rubella laboratories in Anhui, Chongqing, Fujian, Hainan, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu, Xinjiang and Zhejiang provinces during 30 August -5 September 2012 in collaboration with the Health Protection Agency UK, JICA and China CDC.