Poster (in English) presented on the Jena Symposium on Tick-borne Diseases (IPS 2009)

It was the third (and last) Potsdam Symposium I participated. I presented a poster summaring our ongoing investigation aimed to flag ticks in selected locations in defined intervals, pool them and test for presence of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) virus, to confirm the risk for humans. On the conference I met Philippe de Mendonça, an expert coordinating testing of ticks in the EDEN-2 study, who told me that our method of testing of ticks (RT-PCR) is prone to contamination and therefore can give false positive results. Following this discussion, we agreed to switch to a new standardised real-time PCR method elaborated by Schweiger and Casinotti few years ago. We sent our virologist to Munich so she can learn the new method. As a result of implementing this new method, all these results were found to be negative :)