Commissioner for Health Androulla Vassiliou visited the ECDC’s headquarters in Stockholm on 30 June, 2008. The programme included a meeting with the senior management team, a briefing on ECDC’s latest developments as well as a tour of ECDC’s Emergency Operations Centre which was recently opened.

ECDC Director, Zsuzsanna Jakab, said that she was delighted to welcome Commissioner Vassiliou to the Centre.This is the culmination of a series of high level meetings to reach international consensus on terms and conditions for sharing viruses between originating countries, WHO Collaborating Centres and third parties, and to revise the terms of reference of WHO Collaborating Centres. It follows from a Resolution at the World Health Assembly  Earlier meetings have taken place in Djakarta and Singapore (an interdisciplinary meeting) and well as considerable work by WHO staff and other concerned with work on influenza. ECDC earlier published a briefing for the European Union and this has now been revised to include details of the documents prepared for the Intergovernmental Meeting.