A Message From the President of ISTM

Frank von Sonnenburg, MD, MPH

Dear Colleagues,

It was a pleasure to see and talk with so many of you at the highly successful and stimulating CISTM10 in Vancouver. It is an honor to serve as your President for the next two years and I would like to highlight some recent ISTM achievements and some of our plans for the next year. Over the summer and early fall, implementation of the Executive Board (EB) resolutions from Vancouver are already proceeding quickly.

The Certificate of Knowledge Examination (CTH) initiative has been a huge success with 486 candidates sitting for the 2007 exam in Vancouver. Currently, 26.4% or 613 of our 2327 members are certified. The successful candidates come from 38 countries. One of our priorities is to make the CTH exam more accessible to members in different parts of the world. We have decided to administer the exam on an annual basis. Thus it will not only be administered at our biennial CISTM (CISTM11 will be in Budapest in 2009), but also at our regional RISTM conferences. These regional conferences are co-organized with local travel medicine organisations in various areas of the world and are held in the intermediate year between CISTMs. The next exam will be offered in Melbourne, Australia on February 24, 2008.

The EB spent a half-day discussing possible initiatives to expand the scope of ISTM into the arena of post-travel medical care of ill-returned travellers. While the ISTM is the recognized worldwide leader in the clinical and scientific provision of pre-travel medical consultation, competence in post-travel care is a more fragmented discipline, with some overlap between tropical medicine societies, infectious diseases societies, and the ISTM. Most often, "post-travel" is only a peripheral priority within infectious diseases societies, and the tropical medicine societies are increasingly focusing on medical care delivery within tropical and developing countries. Nevertheless, with the continuing growth of international travel, the ill-returned traveller presents unique issues and deserves specific approaches based on the best clinical science.

Let me give you a recent example: Professor Eli Schwartz, director of the Israel GeoSentinel site, reported a 25-person outbreak of schistosomiasis among tourists who visited an exclusive and well-known safari camp in Africa. Within hours of the GeoSentinel alert, we found in the records of our Munich clinic another patient who became infected in that same camp. Geosentinel sites and Network Members worldwide are now alerted and engaged in enhanced surveillance to detect asymptomatic individuals who may have been infected in this one camp. This also resulted in changes to our pre-travel advice for safari camps in that area, demonstrating that sound pre-travel advice depends on an integrated approach encompassing post-travel care. See "Result of Survey of ISTM Members on the Role of Post-travel Medicine in ISTM's Strategic Planning."

One of my chief goals in the next two years is to focus on strengthening ISTM's post-travel mission. The Executive Board felt that the ISTM should offer clinicians who provide post-travel care a home for scientific exchange to complement our maturity in the pre-travel arena. We do not want to compete in this field with other professional societies, but we want to complement existing activities with a focused approach for the benefit of the returning traveller. Our first priority might be to ensure that the wider medical community knows to take a travel history from every ill patient who had the possibility of travel.

On the administrative side the ISTM has never been stronger. In 2003 we had 1,814 paying members; today we have 2,327, a 28.2% increase. We have recently moved to larger quarters just outside Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and now have two full-time staff. We are offering more services and benefits to members than ever, including the JTM, NewsShare, the CTH exam annually, meetings annually in far-flung corners of the world, a teaching slide set, and a popular and lively electronic discussion group, TravelMed, with over 1,200 subscribers.

Yet we face challenges in providing many services to so many members. Because travel medicine is a second or third professional society for the majority of our physician members and so many of our members are in the nursing profession, our dues must be kept below many comparable societies. With this constraint and also with decreasing pharmaceutical sponsorship at our meetings, we are not yet of a sufficient size where we can afford a trained and certified association management professional. I would like to commend Brenda and Brooke, together with our Secretary-Treasurer David Freedman, for the many times they go the extra mile to keep our Society running.

Finally, I would like to ask you for feedback. Please let me know your thoughts at president@istm.org.

Best wishes for 2008. I look forward to seeing you in Melbourne in February. And please take the time now to mark Budapest, May 2009 on your calendar.

Frank is Professor and Head of the Section of International Medicine & Public Health, Department of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, University of Munich, Germany. A profile of Frank can be found in NewShare, March/April 2006, on the ISTM website.