The VIII International Colloquium on Invertebrate Pathology and Microbial Control and the

VIth International Bacillus thuringiensis Conference were held at Iguassu Falls, Brazil,

August 18-23,2002.

Of the 347 registrants at the Colloquium, >l00 were from Latin America, primarily from

Brazil and Mexico. There was an unusually strong contingent from the UK, indicative of an upswing in there. The only Australian registrants were

Dudley Pinnock (Microbial Products, Adelaide), Cheryl Beard (CSIRO Entomology) and me.

The Colloquium had the usual full program of symposia, contributed paper, poster sessions

and workshops, including one on Ethics, Legal and Regulatory Concerns of Transgenic

Plants. The plenary session was devoted to baculoviruses, presumably because of the interest

of the Chairman of the Organising Committee because there appeared to be no new

developments flagged in any of the four presentations. As there were three concurrent

sessions, my attention was given largely to the bacterial presentations. The highlights of the

conference were the report of resistance to Bt in a natural populations of a second species, the

large interaction between plant variety and Bt toxins, and the absence of non-target effects of

Bt.

I presented two contributed papers and chaired a Contributed Papers session. At the Business

Meeting during the conference, I took over the role as secretary of the Society for

Invertebrate Pathology, having previously been elected by postal ballot.