It’s been quite a few months since I wrote to all of you. Council has been busy and I will give you an update of our activities.

The World Health Organization consulted TID Council (among others) on a document to be called “preparedness and response to health emergencies”. We were given a tight timeline to respond, but Council rose to the occasion – many thanks to all members of Council.

The TTS Education sub-committee is working with TID Council to hold a Jeopardy! game. Alessandra Mularoni and Monica Slavin have come up with an excellent set of questions, all based on the TID literature of the past few years. Cameron Wolfe will act as emcee. Several TTS bigwigs have agreed to participate. We hope TID members will sign up, join teams and have a fun time learning. You may sign up at www.tts.org/tts-tid-jeopardy-june21.

We are also working on TID Congress 2022. This will be held online over two half-days. Many thanks to Cameron Wolfe and Wanessa Clemente for helming this. Do look out for the announcements – the webinars will be held on November 16th and 17th this year.

As you are all aware, there are regular CPCs on diagnostic enigmas in TID. I am grateful to Malinis Maricar, Wanessa Clemente and Stephanie Pouch for having pulled the past few episodes together. This is a collaboration between our section and the TID journal. We would also like to thank Nicole Theodoropoulos (who worked on the CPCs on behalf of the journal). If you have an interesting case, you may submit it as clinical correspondence to TID journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/13993062/homepage/forauthors.html). If you missed them, you can still view them on our website.

Council is working towards crystallizing the importance of TID, and is developing a set of “quality indicators in TID”. Transplant programs are measured by patient and graft survival, mainly, and we all know these are crucially important. However, getting the TID aspects right will cut morbidity, and may even reduce mortality. We are currently developing the indicators. The immunocompromised host group of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the American Society of Transplantation, the Asian Society of Transplantation, and the Australian Society of Infectious Diseases have named their representatives to the work group. We will engage our membership on this matter as the project evolves.

We have received from our members several requests to disseminate surveys, to endorse projects. Council has come up with a guidance document on how best to assist with these in a fair and consistent manner. In brief, we are happy to assist if the requestor is a dues-paid TID member, though Council will still need to vote on the request. If you want endorsement from Council, however, the bar is higher. Do approach us if you have such requests and we will be happy to share the details with you.

As many countries open up from the strictures of COVID-19, we are all busier than ever. Still, I urge you to listen to the CPCs via our website, and join in the various educational activities we are organizing. These lighter activities still carry great learning value.