Address by President Sandra Gewehr at the 11th EMCA three-day workshop

The XIth European Mosquito Control Agency (EMCA) three-day Workshop in Mendrisio, Switzerland, between 2 and 4 December 2024, was successfully completed.
The Director of Research and Development of Ecodevelopment Sandra Gewehr, who is currently serving as the EMCA’s President, welcomed the workshop participants from 17 countries around the world and opened the workshop proceedings with a presentation on the importance of choosing the topic of communication for mosquito control. She noted that “effective communication is essential in public health to ensure that scientific knowledge, risk assessment, and preventive and response measures to be taken are conveyed to different audiences, such as the public, stakeholders and policy makers”. She also stressed the central role that mosquito control companies have in communicating about mosquito science because they are the ones who bridge science and practice, implement policies and interact directly with communities.

In her closing presentation, after presenting statistics on the participation in this year’s workshop, she detailed the current mosquito control landscape in Europe and highlighted the relatively low level of awareness of the problems arising from vector-borne diseases compared to the US and the rest of the world, as well as the lack of harmonization of health policies on mosquito control and the lack of risk linkage between mosquitoes and vector-borne diseases.

Finally, she made an important reference to efforts for international and intercontinental cooperation to prepare common guidelines for specific mosquito control tools (EMCA/AMCA/PAMCA Cooperation).
It is worth mentioning that 12 participants from Greece, representatives of mosquito control companies, research institutions and public administration attended the 11th Workshop of the European Mosquito Control Agency.