The sixth International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance, IMED 2016will be held in Vienna, Austria from 4–7 November 2016. For those whose work deals with threats from infectious agents, IMED 2016 will once again bring leading scientists, clinicians and policy makers to Vienna to present new knowledge and breakthroughs and discuss how to discover, detect, understand, prevent and respond to outbreaks of emerging pathogens.