Dr Karen Keddy
Head of the Enteric Diseases Reference Unit, National Institute for Communicable Diseases, National Health Laboratory Service, South Africa
Dr Karen Keddy is currently Head and Senior consultant of the Enteric Diseases Reference Unit (EDRU) of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, South Africa and Senior Consultant in Division of Virology and Communicable Diseases Surveillance, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She qualified as a medical doctor in 1987 and specialized as a microbiologist in 1996. She spent three months as a guest researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States of America, before returning to form EDRU, building the unit from two staff members to its current staffing of 10 people. During the following years the unit has grown in expertise and capacity to fully identify and characterize the major enteric bacterial pathogens.
Dr Keddy provides advice and support to the National Department of Health, assists in regional outbreaks of diarrhoea, coordinates national laboratory based surveillance for diarrhoeal pathogens and acts in an advisory role in the internal Quality Assessment and external Quality Assessment schemes that are run by the National Health Laboratory Service. She has published on a range of pathogens associated with bacterial enteric diseases and supervised post graduate students in these pathogens.
Her current research interests include surveillance and molecular epidemiology of enteric pathogens, enteric toxins and molecular analysis of enteric toxins, antibiotic resistance in enteric pathogens and vaccines against enteric pathogens.