In his Welcome address to the WVPA 18th Congress, Dr Nicolas Eterradossi, Secretary of the French branch of WVPA, explained that his country is hosting one of the biggest of the Association's meetings. A total of 1,288 delegates from 79 countries had pre-registered for the meeting, he said, so the total attendance is likely to be more than 1,300.

The meeting in Nantes is being held at the La Cité events centre (pictured).

Adding his welcome was Dr Trevor Bagust of the University of Melbourne in Australia and President of the Association, which now has 2,500 members across the world.

Looking ahead to the next three days of the meeting, he highlighted the forthcoming sessions on both classical and emerging diseases of poultry as well as zoonoses, infections that impact both man and birds. He said that while avian influenza A(H5N1) dominated our thinking for the first decade of the 21st century, it is the recent H7N9 serotype in China that the World Health Organization describes as "unusually dangerous". Because it causes no symptoms in poultry, its presence is much more difficult to track and there is also evidence of person-to-person transmission of infection, he said.

In closing, Dr Bagust acknowledged the support and cooperation by the local organisers as well as the industry sponsor and partners.

Five plenary lectures were presented today, one on each of the leading topics of the Congress:

• Microbiological safety of poultry products: past, present and future - Dr Gilles Salvat (France)
• Fusarium trichothecene mycotoxins and intestinal health in poultry - Dr Siska Croubels (Belgium)
• Bacterial respiratory diseases of poultry: diagnosis and control - Dr Hafez M. Hafez (Germany)
• Oncogenic avian viruses: Models for virus evolution, microRNA function and cancer - Dr Venugopal Nair (UK)
• Is Mycoplasma synoviae out-running M. gallisepticum? - Dr Wil Landman (The Netherlands)

The first day of the meeting was completed by a sponsor symposium entitled 'The Convenience of Process and Performance Improvement' by MSD.