In this article an infectious diseases pharmacist discusses some of many learning tidbits from ESCMID Global 2025, the largest international meeting of clinical microbiologists and infectious diseases specialists.
Authored By: Timothy P. Gauthier, Pharm.D., BCPS, BCIDP
Article Posted 16 April 2025
This year the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) held their main annual conference called ‘ESCMID Global’ in Vienna, Austria. This meeting is typically attended by around 16,000 professionals, including some of the greatest minds from the fields of clinical microbiology (CM) and infectious diseases (ID). It provides a forum for obtaining a greater understanding about a variety of topics in these fields. Many attendees come to present their research and explore emerging technologies. Some people describe it as a European version of IDweek.
I always learn a lot from meetings such as ESCMID Global. This comes from talking to other attendees, sitting in on lectures, chatting with folks around the scientific posters, checking posts from social media, and just the overall experience of participating in the event. This year I thought it might be fun to share a few tidbits that came up along the way. Maybe they will be new for you and you might share this post with others too. Fair warning, it is not all sunshine and rainbows. Also notably I spent time focusing
1. There is a thing called a “Rabies Room”
In a lecture by Dr. David Paterson on the topic of antimicrobial resistance in Asia, he mentioned encountering a “Rabies Room”, displaying a photograph of a jail cell door. I believe it was from Indonesia where rabies patients may not have access to rabies post-exposure prophylaxis. It is a very sad circumstance where the patient is placed under poor conditions and then is left in such a state to succumb to the disease while their friends and family may visit them from the other side of the bars. To imagine having a child who acquires rabies and be treated in this way is something that is very disturbing.
I found this brief story about the topic online here.
2. We need to recognize the value of adapting bar graphs to include simple data visualization enhancements
As Dr. Diane Ashiru was discussing proxy indicators to estimate appropriateness of antibiotic prescriptions she displayed a typical graph of antimicrobial consumption over time. In a bar graph, rather than using the standard colored bars, she replaced them with drug bottles in various sizes, which indicated more or less antibiotic use. Each bottle was labeled with the data point and the year. I found myself staring at this graphic, which was completely motivated by the visual appeal of presenting data in such a way.
In the future when preparing data trend bar graphs, selectively adopting graphics to incorporate a better visualization strategy is something I plan to try to do to help accentuate particularly important points.
3. Guideline nerds exist
During a lecture discussing if it was prime time yet for using artificial intelligence to develop guidelines, the speakers and moderators went into detail on the nuances of writing a clinical practice guideline. It seemed obvious that variability in international guidelines existed, but I was taken aback by the nuances of clinical guideline methodology. From a quality perspective, considerations include presentation in the guideline of literature searches details, electronic database use, data search strategies, systems to assess quality of evidence, use of PRISMA flow diagram, and risk of bias assessment. Each of these has a slew of factors to navigate.
It was impressive to observe the depth and breadth of knowledge the speakers demonstrated. They had clearly spent a great deal of time considering and debating guideline development. A nerd is defined as a person who is extremely enthusiastic and knowledgeable about a particular subject, especially one of specialist or niche interest. I know this because my wife told me to look it up one day, and yes I am an antibiotic nerd. I’m grateful these guideline nerds exist and I have a great appreciation for the value they are bringing to the space!
If you have a question about guideline development, I will bet if you make an effort to connect with someone, you can find an expert to give you some advice.
4. Screening your manuscript using ChatGPT can cause loss of confidentiality
This session was about the rare art of writing scientific articles. Dr. Erlangga Yusuf discussed artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for writing scientific articles. The session ended with a robust discussion from the presenters and moderators. One thing that I did not consider is that if you have a manuscript and use ChatGPT to review it for quality enhancements ahead of journal submission, the ChatGPT system would now have your work in the database, and it may even be used as a citation in a future answer the program can produce. An audience member noted it can depend on the type of subscription the user has, but nevertheless this was a risk I did not consider and am now happy to be aware of.
I have not tried using ChatGPT to work on or review a manuscript. One of my take home points was to consider using pieces of the manuscript rather than the whole thing, if using AI to get a second opinion of your work ahead of journal submission. I also valued the suggestion to try to use AI prior to delving into the heavy writing, rather than on the back end.
In another section the question was posed about how you would feel as a writer if your manuscript was put for peer review by AI. I thought this was interesting to ponder.
BONUS POINT: This session also included a lecture by Dr. Angela Huttner, who is the current editor-in-chief of the wonderful journal Clinical Microbiology Infection (CMI) Communications. She went through some basics of writing in English. As a native English speaker was embarrassed to learn the rule that a comma always precedes ‘which’ but never ‘that’. This was a nice simple tidbit to pick up, which I hope to use now that I have it in my toolkit!
5. Collective profits for the big 5 academic publishers is about $20,000,000,000 a year
How many “prestige points” have you generated in the last few year? Well, on the backs of so many that work for free, the publishing companies are raking in BILLIONS of dollars, with profit margins in the 20-40% range. This was discussed by Dr. Amelia Joseph during a session about re-imagining peer review.
After the session there was a robust panel discussion. I thought the commentary on removing the requirement to suggest peer reviewers in the manuscript process was a great idea. Also, conversation about potentially including exceptional peer reviewers as authors (assuming they meet ICJME criteria and authors agree), was interesting.
Closing Comments
There was so much more happening at ESCMID Global 2025, check out their accounts on social media as well as the conference hashtags to learn more. For example, the SNAP trial looking at PSSA and MSSA was another item of major interest. Dr. Sax goes into in detail here if you want more.
RECOMMENDED TO YOU
