Atlanta

For once it was my turn to attend a conference and I went to Atlanta for the annual ASTMH (american society for tropical medicine and hygiene) meeting. This is a huge meeting with 2000 abstracts and 6000 people attending. It was very nice to meet a lot of the STI people but due to the largeness of the meeting I saw most of the people only once... I managed to go out with my former Tanzanian lab-mate Mugasa though and this was a lot of fun. We went to an Irish Pub where Taylor our grad student tried to explain the rules of football. We were joined later by the Nobel prize laureate Peter Agre who I met before in San Diego where he gave a talk. He used to work on red blood cells but has recently joined the Malaria field.



On Sunday we went to the aquarium which was great! They have a huge tank (of course it is America but this one is really huge!) where they keep a number of sharks, tuna, Mantas and four whale sharks! Even though this is very impressive my favorite animal were the otters! They come in two sizes: small and fast and big and cuddly. The aquarium does a very good job at educating and rising awareness of ecological problems.