Good Morning Conference, 
Today we begin week three and session two of the PPR-GREN e-conference in which we discuss and agree on the main themes to be addressed in PPR-GREN. At the start of the conference, before being inundated, I tried to categorize the contributions.   After just two days I had seven main themes and 33 sub-themes and there would have been many more if I had continued.   I will not list them here because it the job of our conference to develop these themes jointly. We propose to keep the number of themes to a manageable four or five; any more may make us start to lose focus.  
The first two weeks generated good participation with interaction between laboratory, field and policy stakeholders on a variety of subjects and it is tempting to suggest the main themes should be cross-cutting to continue this all-inclusive involvement.  However, I don’t know how much time busy researchers and field staff can devote to following all the ins and outs of a wide-ranging network.   You might prefer to follow only one thematic group in depth whilst keeping abreast of developments in others through periodic summaries from thematic group leaders. Just for example should we consider themes which might appeal to the laboratory researchers, such as vaccine development and new diagnostics, whereas field staff might find more of interest in vaccine delivery and epidemiology? It is very likely there will be considerable overlap and cross-pollination between the themes.  We look forward to your suggestions for the themes supported by your
 justifications for these and your anticipated outputs.
Although the structure of the conference is for us to consider the sub-themes next week (together with session 4 - other diseases of small ruminants that could be addressed along with PPR)  I realise that some sub-themes will start to be discussed almost immediately. This  may help in some decision making  but we will try concentrate on the main themes first.   When the time comes, assigning sub-themes to appropriate themes may still require debate: for instance, new antibody detection assays will appeal to monoclonal antibody researchers and also to vaccination campaign managers who will use them for seromonitoring as well as the epidemiologists who will need their results during serosurveillance. 
To start things rolling I am posting up suggestions for themes that were sent in last week and hope they will stimulate this discussion. 
Kind regards, 
Paul Rossiter,
from Africa’s Great Rift Valley where, like almost everywhere else, it is raining hard and unseasonably.

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