Ever since the beginning of BULGARIAN ASSOCIATION OF MICROBIOLOGISTS we aimed high:

- To increase public importance and prestige of our specialties;

- To manage the quality of laboratory work to reach the most modern world standards;

- To create modern science that can serve as a basis for regulation and quality management;

Many of these goals are achieved! In the beginning we were only professionals who worked with microbes - bacteriologists, virologists, mycologists and parasitologists. Gradually the medical community realized that close specialization only on a particular microbe or on a particular enzyme of a microbe are probably good for personal career, but do not meet public health needs. By reaching this realization we came to the consensus that it is great to know everthing about some of the infections, but you must also know atleast somethings about each of them.

 

Since then we annually recognize the work of National Reference Centers and Reference Laboratories, making information about their activities during the past year available. This year we should note the adequate response to re-emerging dangerous infections such as Brucellosis and Anthrax. Rapid and effective response against new threats such as West Nile Fever, Zica Virus etc., were again a great challenge. The adoption of the new standard for determining drug resistance of clinically relevant bacteria - EUCAST - put the quality management of the laboratories to the test and not all of them coped well enough. Many companies offering laboratory equipment and reagents, drugs and vaccines, support our educational activities for better Bulgarian public health.


Success in any field of modern medicine is not possible if disconnected from the development of our specialties. We can easily enumerate the fields of medicine or medical specialties, where the most common pathology is infectious, and there are many modern fields where the pathology is due to a past infection or antigenic irritation. Unfortunately increasingly growing number of doctors are prescribing antibiotics without even thinking about which exact microbes are they fighting within a particular patient.