Rabies, travel vaccines and global trends in vaccine-preventable diseases

Kristine Macartney is a paediatrician and infectious disease specialist. She is a medical graduate of the University of NSW and has over 20 years of experience in vaccinology.

She has experience working in the US at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was a founding member of the US Vaccine Education Center. Her Doctorate of Medicine was on rotavirus infection, in particular the mucosal immune response to novel vaccine candidates. She is interested in all aspects of vaccine preventable disease research, particularly policy development, vaccine safety and prevention of viral diseases. She is the Senior Editor of the Australian Immunisation Handbook. Kristine is a Staff Specialist in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead and has a conjoint academic appointment as Professor in the Discipline of Child and Adolescent Health at the University of Sydney.

Dr Sarah Britton is the Director of the One Health Unit at the interim Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC). An experienced executive leader with 30 years of One Health and biosecurity experience across the government, private and not-for-profit sectors, she is a former NSW Chief Veterinary Officer. Previously, Sarah founded three start-up businesses and was the Managing Director of One Biosecurity Solutions. She is an experienced Chair of Wildlife Health Australia and a trusted advisor to government and industry on One Health, veterinary and public health risk management.

Dr Santanu Chatterjee has been working in travel and tropical medicine practice for the last 30 years. Currently, he is a Visiting Lecturer at the KPC Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata and International Advisor in Travel Medicine to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.

Dr Chatterjee sits on the International Medical Advisory Board of IAMAT, the International Association for Medical Assistance To Travellers (Canada), and is a past President of the Asia-Pacific Travel Health Society (2006–2008). He has previously acted as Counsellor of the International Society of Travel Medicine (1999–2003), Chair of the Host Countries Committee of the International Society of Travel Medicine (1999–2006), the Regional Editor of NewShare (2001–2009), a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Travel Medicine and a member of the World Health Organization External Review Group of International Travel and Health.

In 2008, Dr Chatterjee was admitted as a Fellow of the Faculty of Travel Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow; he was subsequently elected both a Fellow of the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine, in 2011, and a Fellow of the International Society of Travel Medicine, in 2019.

Dr Filipe de Neri Machado (‘Dr Neri’) has worked as a medical doctor in Timor-Leste since 2012. He attained his Master in Public Health in 2018 in the Lautém municipality in East Timor.

Dr Neri has been the National Director of Public Health at the National Institute of Public Health, Timor-Leste (INSP-TL) since 2023. He is passionate about public health, especially epidemiology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Neri was a team leader in surveillance and epidemiology for COVID-19 prevention and mitigation in Timor-Leste.

He is currently completing the Field Epidemiology Training Program – Intermediate at the University of Newcastle (Australia) and holds a fellowship at the International Visitor Leadership Program for Public Health (US).

Dr Deborah Mills is the Medical Director of a full-time specialised travel medicine clinic in Brisbane, Australia. She has worked in the area of travel medicine since 1988. She founded the Travel Medicine Alliance, a network of travel medicine clinics across Australia.

As part of a research collaboration with academic groups from Australian Universities, Dr Mills has published clinic-based research that has influenced travel medicine guidelines in Australia and internationally. Her current research interests are intradermal vaccines (especially rabies and Japanese encephalitis vaccines), sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis, vaccine side effects, ciguatera, needle phobia, systems-based travel medicine and the delivery of health information to travellers. Her book Travelling Well is now in its 21st edition, with over 210,000 copies in print.

Dr Sarah McGuinness is an academic infectious diseases physician. She currently holds dual positions as Consultant Physician in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Alfred Hospital (Travel Medicine Clinic) and Senior Research Fellow in the Infectious Diseases Epidemiology Unit within the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. Her research focuses on improving strategies to combat preventable infections in at-risk populations – including travellers, immigrants and refugees, healthcare workers, and those living in resource-constrained settings – both locally and globally, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

Dr McGuinness graduated in medicine from the University of Melbourne in 2006 and undertook specialist training in infectious diseases in Melbourne and Darwin. She completed a Diploma in Tropical Medicine in Peru in 2010 and a Master of Public Health at James Cook University in 2015. She was awarded her PhD, on ‘Understanding the health effects of water and hygiene interventions in low- and middle-income countries’, in December 2019 from Monash University. In 2020, Sarah undertook a secondment to the then Department of Health and Human Services to support the Victorian public health response to COVID-19. She is a National Health and Medical Research Council Emerging Leadership 1 Fellow (2023–2027) and a Royal Australasian College of Physicians Cottrell Research Establishment Fellow (2023).

Dr McGuinness is an active member of the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM), the Asia Pacific Travel Health Society and the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases. She is the current Chair of the ISTM’s Digital Communications Committee and Associate Editor of the Journal of Travel Medicine. She is also unit coordinator for the Monash University Master of Public Health subjects ‘Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Prevention’ and ‘Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases’.

Dr Megan Young is a Public Health Physician at the Metro North Public Health Unit in Brisbane. Until 2020, she also worked as an academic at Griffith University on the Gold Coast. She holds a continuing Adjunct Associate Professor appointment at Griffith and is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Queensland. She regularly sits on state and national communicable disease policy working groups. Her research interests in notifiable conditions have led to more than 40 publications. She regularly manages potential exposures to rabies in returned travellers as part of her Public Health Unit work.