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A team of clinicians, laboratory staff and researchers from the St. Maarten Medical Center (SMMC) and the Amalia Children’s Hospital, Radboudumc, led by Lilly Verhagen, was recently selected to present at the 3rd edition of the Dutch Caribbean Research Week 2023, a five-day online conference.
Lilly Verhagen is a pediatrician – infectious diseases & immunology subspecialist at Amalia Children’s Hospital and the Radboudumc Laboratory of Medical Immunology. She also holds honorary positions at St. Maarten Medical Center on St. Maarten, the Caribbean, and at Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa. She leads a multidisciplinary international team focused on combating respiratory infections in children worldwide by improving our understanding of the respiratory mucosal immune system.
Their studies in the Caribbean have shown that St. Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius are particularly burdened by respiratory infections and that island transmission dynamics are different, suggesting that preventive measures, such as vaccination strategies, may need to be adapted. The current practice is to copy (timing of) such measures from the Netherlands. The team’s presentation was very well received and several news stories were published in local and international newspapers.
