Terms & Conditions

This website is published by the Société Tunisienne de Biologie Clinique, the STBC. By opening a page of it, you accept these terms as they stand. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

They apply to every part of the site: the pages describing the society and its governing bodies, the congress and activity listings, the news section, and the Jeunes STBC section written for students and residents. They apply in the same way whether you read the site in French or in English. No account is required, nothing here sits behind a login, and reading the site costs nothing.

The members' application that the site links to is a separate application, with its own address and its own conditions. These terms do not govern it, and they do not govern any other site you reach by following a link from here.

The site is published by the Société Tunisienne de Biologie Clinique, known as the STBC and, in English, as the Tunisian Society of Clinical Biology. The STBC is a non-profit learned association governed by decree-law no. 2011-88 of 24 September 2011 relating to associations.

The society brings together biologists concerned with the methods and biological investigations that contribute to the prevention, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of human disease. It promotes the different specialties of clinical biology, and it supports scientific exchange and continuing training. This site serves those aims: it publishes the society's activities and congresses, its news, and resources for young biologists.

You can reach the society at the details below.

The site is a public information and continuing-education resource. It is addressed first to the society's audience — biologists, doctors, pharmacists, residents and students of clinical biology — but it is open to anyone, free of charge and without registration.

You may read it, keep a copy for your own use, and point other people to it. Teaching and scientific use is not merely tolerated here, it is the reason the material is published.

The site is deliberately open. The rules below exist so that it can stay that way, and they come down to one idea: do not act unlawfully, and do not interfere with the site or with the people using it.

When you use the site, you undertake not to:

Unless a page says otherwise, what is published here belongs to the STBC or to the people who contributed it: the speakers, session chairs, authors and members who prepare the society's scientific material. This covers the texts, the page structure, the graphic design, the photographs, the programmes, the presentations and the documents offered for download. The rights of contributors are treated with the same care as the society's own.

The STBC name and logo identify the society. They may not be reproduced, imitated, or included in another sign or in a domain name without written permission. The names and logos of partner societies and federations, and of the organisations the site links to, belong to their own owners.

Consulting the site and reproducing its content for personal, non-commercial use is permitted. Any other use — reproduction, translation, adaptation, republication, distribution on another site, or inclusion in material circulated beyond your own use — requires the society's prior written permission.

The contact form is the one place on this site where you can send us a message. It asks for your name, your email address, your telephone number, a subject and your message. Please make sure that what you write is accurate, and that you are entitled to send it.

One rule matters more than the rest: do not send patient-identifying information through this form. No names, no identity or file numbers, no dates of birth or addresses, and no images, reports or result sheets from which a person could be recognised. If your question concerns a case, describe it in general terms with every identifying detail removed. Professional secrecy binds you when you write to the society exactly as it binds you in the laboratory.

We use what you send in order to understand and answer your request. Please also refrain from sending, through this form:

This site publishes scientific and educational material: congress programmes and abstracts, presentations, clinical cases, tutorials, and training resources for residents and students. It is written by professionals of clinical biology, for professionals and for those training to become one.

None of it is medical advice. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prescription, a validated protocol, or a recommendation for the care of a particular person. It does not replace clinical judgement, the examination of a patient, the professional rules that apply to you, or a consultation with a doctor or a pharmacist. Please do not use this site to diagnose, to treat, or to decide on a change of treatment.

Clinical cases are published in order to teach. They describe one situation, often simplified for the lesson, and are not to be transposed to another patient. Scientific content ages too: a method or a reference that was sound when it was published may since have been superseded. Check the current literature and the guidance in force before acting on it.

If you are not a health professional and you have a question about your own health or your own results, speak to your doctor, your pharmacist, or the laboratory that carried out the analysis. This site cannot answer it.

The site links out in several directions: to partner learned societies and federations, including the IFCC, to the society's YouTube channel, to documents and bibliographic resources hosted elsewhere, to official Tunisian health information, and to the STBC members' application, which runs at its own address. The sharing buttons on news articles lead out as well, to the social network you choose.

Those links are there because the resources are useful. Once you follow one, you have left this site. The society does not control those services, does not maintain them, and cannot check their content continuously. A link is not an endorsement of everything published at the other end of it, and an address that is correct today may point somewhere else tomorrow.

From the moment you arrive, the terms and the privacy rules of the destination apply instead of ours; they may be very different. Two pages of this site also display a map supplied by an external service, which means your browser contacts that service directly when the map loads. The cookie policy describes that in detail.

The site is offered free of charge and, as far as we are able, without interruption. We cannot promise that it will always be reachable, or that every page and every function will behave identically in every browser, on every device and on every network.

Access may be suspended without notice for maintenance, for technical or security work, or for reasons outside the society's control, such as a network, hosting or third-party service failure. Some pages depend on an external service for the list of activities and events; when that service is unavailable, those pages may show fewer entries than usual, or none at all.

The content changes too. Pages are corrected, updated, reorganised or withdrawn. Congress programmes in particular are revised as an event takes shape, so the version you read today may not be the one you read last month. Nothing published here is a commitment that it will remain online, or remain unchanged.

The society prepares this site with care and corrects mistakes as soon as it learns of them. Even so, it cannot warrant that the information is complete, free of error, or current at the moment you read it. Scientific and regulatory material moves quickly, and a page reflects the state of knowledge at the time it was written.

You use the site under your own responsibility. Professional readers keep full responsibility for their own decisions, and for checking against current sources before applying anything found here. Within the limits allowed by Tunisian law, the society is not liable for damage arising from the use of the site or from the impossibility of using it, from an error or an omission in its content, or from the content of a site reached through a link.

This is not an attempt to escape responsibility. Tunisian law identifies cases in which liability cannot be set aside — in particular fault committed intentionally or through gross negligence, and harm caused to a person — and this section leaves them untouched.

The only personal data you give this site is what you type into the contact form. Two other things deserve to be named: the words you type into the search box on the Activities and Events page travel with the request that fetches the list of events, and your browser keeps a language preference and a display preference. There is no account on this site, no login and no profile, and the site asks you for nothing in order to be read.

In Tunisia, personal data is protected by Loi organique n° 2004-63 du 27 juillet 2004 on the protection of personal data, and the Instance Nationale de Protection des Données à Caractère Personnel (INPDP) oversees its application. The privacy policy sets out what the contact form collects, what it is used for, and the rights you can exercise. The cookie policy sets out what the site keeps in your browser — a language preference and a display preference, and nothing that follows you elsewhere.

If you are reading from the European Union, or from another country whose law applies to you, that law may give you further rights. Write to the society and it will answer as best it can.

These terms, and the use of this site, are governed by Tunisian law.

If a disagreement arises, please write to us first. Most questions about a page, a permission or a mistake in the content are settled in a few messages. Where an amicable settlement proves impossible, the dispute falls within the jurisdiction of the competent Tunisian courts.

This choice of law and of jurisdiction does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory rule that applies to you where you live.

If a provision of these terms is held to be unlawful or unenforceable, it is set aside only to that extent, and the remaining provisions continue to apply.

These terms are published in French and in English. The two versions have the same meaning; where they differ, the French version governs, the society being an association under Tunisian law whose statutes are drawn up in French.

The society may change these terms — because the site itself changes, because a new section is added, or because the law or the society's practice moves on. The version in force is always the one on this page, shown together with the date it was last revised.

We do not send individual notices when the text changes, and there is no mailing list for it. If these terms matter to you, because you reuse content from the site or because you write to the society regularly, read them again from time to time.

Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised terms. If a change does not suit you, the remedy is straightforward: stop using the site, and tell us why. An objection we never hear explained is one we cannot act on.

Questions about these terms, requests for permission to reproduce content, corrections to a page and reports of a broken link all go to the same place.

Please say which page you are writing about, and in what capacity: a request to reproduce a congress programme is not handled in the same way as a correction to a date, or a question from a student. The society is run by volunteers, so an answer may take a little time.