Dr Meiring, Susan

Dr Susan Meiring is the Clinical Coordinator for the GERMS-SA Surveillance Network. GERMS-SA coordinates and runs national and sentinel, laboratory-based and clinical surveillance programmes of ‘diseases-of-public-health-importance’ at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa. From the many surveillance programmes, special studies arise which are planned and coordinated by the GERMS-SA staff. Meiring has been the principal investigator for three special studies, namely meningococcal carriage study in university students, neonatal bloodstream infections and meningitis study in secondary level institutions, and SARS-CoV-2 clinical characterisation and evaluation of shedding duration amongst patients hospitalised with COVID-19. Furthermore, she has been a co-investigator on many other surveillance studies.
GERMS-SA surveillance programmes cover a variety of bacterial, fungal and viral infections, including hospital-associated infections caused by pathogens such as Carbapenemase-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), Acenitobacter baumanii and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). In particular, Meiring has developed a keen interest in the epidemiology of meningococcal and invasive pneumococcal disease and the public health programmes aimed at their prevention. She is also passionate about understanding the various drivers of antimicrobial resistance in isolates from neonatal sepsis in South Africa.
She received her medical degree from the University of Cape Town in 2003 and is currently pursuing a PhD part-time (looking at the epidemiology of meningococcal disease in South Africa) through the School of Public Health at the University of Witwatersrand. She is a member of the Global Meningococcal Initiative and has published over 20 peer reviewed articles, in addition to being a peer reviewer for papers submitted to Emerging Infectious Diseases, PLoSOne and Lancet Infectious Diseases. In 2019 Meiring received the Young Investigators Award for life-time contribution to infectious disease research from the Institut Merieux and the South African Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases.