Shigella was the leading cause of diarrheal disease during World War One; and more than 100 years later, it continues to cause 200 million cases and 216,000 deaths per year. It is a leading cause of moderate to severe diarrhea in children less than five years old in lower- and middle-income nations and sexually transmissible and outbreaks among homeless people now occur across Europe and North America.

The lack of a licensed vaccine, coupled with increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR), has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare Shigella a priority pathogen for which research into new therapeutics are urgently needed. To generate innovative approaches to combat this persistent pathogen, we need a consolidated research community working collaboratively and sharing expertise across scientific domains and sectors. To achieve this goal, we propose an international symposium on Shigella to bring together global expertise covering all aspects of the pathogen and disease. We will include participants from across basic research, clinical and public health, and industry across diverse areas from disease burden, epidemiology, and genomic surveillance, through fundamental biology and infection models, to vaccines and therapeutic approaches.

Despite the substantial burden of disease, no broad international meeting dedicated to Shigella has ever been organized to date. This lack of a dedicated international Shigella meeting is in stark contrast to: leading respiratory pathogens causing disease in similar demographics (e.g. Europneumo: Molecular biology of the pneumococcus [running for > 10 years]); enteric pathogens that cause comparable or lower levels of disease (e.g. Salmonella: From basic biology to complex pathogen-host interactions [GRC 2023], 6th International conference on enterococci [2023], International symposium on Salmonella and salmonellosis [St Malmo, 10th year 2024], Listeria FEMS meetings [20th year in 2019]); and other emerging AMR concerns (e.g. 1st Klebsiella Epidemiology and Biology Symposium [Nov 2024], International Biennial Pseudomonas conference [running for >30 years]).