The pre-elections to the Advisory Council of the European Society for Virology gave a clear result. The voting participation was excellent with a response rate of 46.5%. We thank all voting members for their cooperation.

The following twelve members received the most votes and are thus pre-elected as Members to the Advisory Council (in alphabetical order):

Albert Bosch, Department of Microbiology, University of Barcelona, Spain
Margarita Del Val, Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa, Universidad Autònoma de Madrid, Campus de Cantoblanco, Spain
W. Paul Duprex, Cell and Tissue Imaging Core, Dept. of Microbiology, Boston University School of Medicine, USA
Urs Greber, Institute of Molecular Life Sciences, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Marion Koopmans, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas Mertens, Institute for Virology, University Hospital of Ulm, Germany
Thomas Mettenleiter, Department of Molecular Biology, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Federal Research Institute for Animal Health, Germany
Albert Osterhaus, Department of Virology, Erasmus MC, The Netherlands
Lennart Svensson, Div. of Molecular Virology, Med. Faculty, University of Linköping, Sweden
Jan Svoboda, Dept. of Viral and Cellular Genetics, Institute of Molecular Genetics, Czech Republic
Veronika von Messling, Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, Langen, Germany
Dana Wolf, Clinical Virology Unit, Hadassah University Hospital, Israel

In case one of the pre-elected 12 members of the Advisory Council is elected to the Executive Board later on, the candidate who has recieved the next highest number of votes will succeed to the Advisory Council.

The result of this pre-election has to be confirmed in the course of the Assembly of Members during the 6th European Congress of Viroogy in Hambug, Germany in October.

We thank the pre-elected members for accepting to serve in this council.

Prof. Dr. Giorgio Palù        Prof. Dr. Bernhard Fleckenstein
President                            Secretary General