I am a doctor since 1985 : I started with MSF in Mozambique, Philippines, Pakistan and Lebanon. On my return, I was in charge of health monitoring and safety in decentralized government departments in Paris and Marseille, and I was in charge of emerging diseases, including arboviruses, at the General Health Directorate. I am currently a research professor at EHESP.

Faced with the worldwide Zika epidemic, we asked researchers and infectious diseases specialists for advice on the health risks of this virus, particularly in parturients and their newborns. While Zika was already known in Uganda, it has become more transmissible and probably also more aggressive. It is this outbreak that I will discuss to launch the topic of arbovirus outbreaks in Guyana.

Rachel Lowe is a Research Professor at ICREA and Team Leader of Global Health Resilience in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain. From 2016-2021, she is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she continues to serve on the management committee of the Centre for Climate Change and Planetary Health. Rachel received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Exeter in 2011. Her dissertation focused on integrating climate information into spatio-temporal models to predict the risk of dengue epidemics in Brazil. She has held postdoctoral positions at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy and the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences in Spain, working at the interface of climate prediction science and public health decision making. She has conducted cutting-edge methodological research on unraveling the impacts of global environmental change on infectious disease risk and on developing impact-based forecasting models to inform disease control and prevention strategies in partnership with stakeholders in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. She is the Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown in Europe, a transdisciplinary collaboration that tracks progress on health and climate change.

Bernard Seytre created and manages bnscommunication, a health communication agency. For the past fifteen years, he has been working as an expert in health communication in African countries, for NGOs, international organizations and governments, with the main focus on raising awareness among the population. His approach is based on a “health culture” approach, which consists of studying the population’s representations of the health issue in question, its “health culture”, in order to propose a strategy, messages and adapted communication tools. He has worked in a dozen African countries, notably on Covid-19, Ebola virus disease, HIV, tuberculosis and exclusive breastfeeding.