In pursuit of a more perfect understanding of meningococcal meningitis and to unravel the connections between climate and meningitis, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health hosted a conference in June entitled "Epidemics and the Environment: The Meningitis Challenge in Africa." The program addressed the challenge of controlling epidemic meningitis in Africa and the role that climate data and models might play in improving prediction of outbreaks in both the near and long term.

Held in conjunction with the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), the program is part of the Summer Institute on Climate Information for Public Health, which offers an international group of public health decision makers the opportunity to learn practical methods for integrating climate knowledge and information into decision making processes.

The conference was chaired by Dr. Patrick Kinney, professor of environmental health sciences and director of the Program in Climate and Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. Dean Linda Fried of the Mailman School of Public Health offered welcoming remarks and introduced the program and panel of presenters, who covered a range of issues. Key note speakers included:

• Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who introduced the Meningitis Vaccine Project, a partnership between the World Health Organization and the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health that works to eliminate epidemic meningitis as a public health problem in Sub-Saharan Africa.
  
  
• Dr. Eric Bertherat of the World Health Organization outlined the efforts made by the Meningitis Environmental Risk Information Technologies project to use existing knowledge to improve the understanding of the relationship between bacterial meningitis and environmental parameters. He also explored the potential to use this understanding to provide more timely warnings of the onset of meningitis epidemics and improve the efficacy of prevention and control. Dr. Madeleine Thomas of the IRI, also discussed ways that climate information might be able to improve meningitis control.
  
  
• Dr. Kinney and Dr. Sylwia Trzaska of the IRI and Dr. Yonas Asfaw from Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health participated in a discussion of possible research to illuminate the seasonality of carriage, rather than infection, and the potential benefits of further illuminating the relationship between climate and disease prevalence.

The program raised many critical issues, underscoring the need for climate and health experts to team up in order to predict these meningitis epidemics as well as combat meningitis in Africa – particularly as climate changes increase the prevalence of these outbreaks.