With broad technical expertise in surveillance and response, the Surveillance and Response Support Unit aims at ensuring timely detection of communicable disease threats, their assessment and providing support for enabling Member States to mitigate them.
 
The Unit works in four sections:

Surveillance: Contributing to reducing the incidence and prevalence of communicable disease in Europe by providing relevant public health data, clear analysis, information and reports to decision makers, professionals and healthcare workers in Member States, other public health agencies and key stakeholders to ensure more informed decision making for actions that will result in the timely prevention and control of communicable diseases in Europe.

Response: Coordinating the response support functions in ECDC in order to provide timely support to Member States and the European Commission regarding requests for risk assessments, threat investigations, and provision of experts in the field when requested.

Epidemic Intelligence and Emergency Operations: Ensuring early detection of emerging threats to the EU, their analysis, and the feed back to Member States and stakeholders through daily, weekly and annual threat reports. Maintaining the Emergency Operating Centre (including ICT and communication capacity), plans (public health event plan) and procedures (24/7 duties…) to ensure optimal support to management of public health emergencies.

Epidemiological Methods: Developing and harmonising methods used for surveillance and response to communicable disease threats, in terms of surveillance standards, data management, analysis and presentation.

All activities are carried out in close cooperation with other units of ECDC as well as with external partners across Europe and globally.