Emerging Zoonotic Viral Infections: Do They Find Us or Do We Find Them?

The TMC Library and the UTHealth McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics will host the lecture: Emerging Zoonotic Viral Infections: Do They Find Us or Do We Find Them? On Thursday, February 28, 2013 from 12:00 – 1:00 pm at the auditorium of the University of Texas Medical School, MSBM 3.001, located at 6431 Fannin, Houston, TX 77030.

The lecture will be presented by C. J.Peters, MD, Director for Biodefense at the UTMB Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases and the John Sealy Distinguished University Chair in Tropical and Emerging Virology.

Dr. Peters will discuss the origins of microbial threats. Are they truly “new” or do they arise from mutation or Translocation? Can we predict them? What strategies can we use to control them?

Dr. C. J. Peters is an expert in pathogenesis and epidemiology of viral hemorrhagic fevers and other emerging viral infections. He is currently working on Rift Valley fever vaccines, as well as the pathogenesis and innate resistance to SARS. Prior to joining UTMB, Dr. Peters was chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the CDC, and directed research at the federal Biosafety Level 4 laboratories. Dr. Peters has traveled widely in South America and Africa investigating viral outbreaks. He played a key role in tracking down the hantavirus that caused mysterious deaths in New Mexico in the early 1990s.

For a complete schedule of the Medical Ethics Lecture Series, visit the Medical Ethics Series website: http://www.library.tmc.edu/medicalethics/vaccines2012/

Lunch will be provided on a first-come first-served basis.

Attendees will be eligible to win a drawing for a Kindle E-Book reader by completing a short interactive quiz on National Library of Medicine databases such as PubMed.

This project has been funded in part with federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. HHSN-276-2011-00007-C with the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library.

Additional sponsorship is being provided by UTHealth and by Elsevier, New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Ovid, some of the leading providers of science and health information resources available at the TMC Library.