Landesuntersuchungsamt Rheinland-Pfalz (LUA) - EPIET
Contact person
Tel. +49 6341 43310 71
Fax. +49 6431 85717
Description of the institute
The “Landesuntersuchungsamt“ (LUA, State Agency for Consumer and Health Protection) with its 540 employees in four professional departments (human medicine, food safety, veterinary medicine and risk management) deals with public health issues and consumer affairs. It serves as a main adviser for three ministries: the Ministry of Work and Health, the Ministry of Environment and the Trade Ministry.
LUA runs various laboratories (including a biosafety level 3 laboratory) at 3 locations (Koblenz, Trier and Landau) and the surveillance system for communicable diseases on state level. It assists the 24 municipal public health offices and is in charge of (selection):
- Surveillance of notifiable infectious diseases, both collected through routine reporting and dedicated epidemiological surveys
- Syndromic ARI surveillance based on weekly reporting by kindergartens
- Data analysis, interpretation and dissemination of routine data in a weekly bulletin
- Applied intervention epidemiological research including descriptive and analytical studies
- Surveillance and assessment of vaccination rates in pre-school children
- Outbreak investigations of communicable diseases in a variety of settings, such as the first Clostridium difficile 027 outbreak in Germany, several measles outbreaks (boarding school, training centre for people with mental and physical disabilities) and of course food-borne.
LUA Landau is committed to training and professional development. All staff members are encouraged to participate in training activities which are available within LUA or externally. We train local health department employees in applied infectious diseases epidemiology.
LUA Landau staff responds to frequent media requests on state communicable disease issues (television, radio and print media). There is a strong interdisciplinary cooperation between epidemiology, laboratories, and veterinary medicine, which are all part of LUA.
The EPIET fellow will be based in the Infectious Disease Unit with its staff of 25 in Landau, a charming 45.000 town in one of Germany's best-known wine-producing regions close to the French border. Thanks to the vicinity of two major budget airports, the rest of Europe is not far away.
LUA Landau also has a fully equipped medical microbiological laboratory on site, assisting in the timely conduct of outbreak investigations. We actively take part in Euregio projects, e.g. EUR-Safety Health-net in the Euregio Maas-Rhein together with colleagues from Belgium and the Netherlands.
Training opportunities
LUA Landau offers a rich field of training opportunities and projects, depending on the scientific background, experience and personal interest of the fellow. They include outbreak investigations, improving vaccination status, enhancing and evaluating surveillance systems, design and conduct of epidemiological studies, teaching and communication. We invite the fellow to develop and contribute own ideas; short-term international assignments are supported, too. In addition, the fellow of LUA Landau can draw on the experience of the excellent PAE/EPIET infrastructure at the Robert-Koch Institute (RKI), Berlin, including weekly journal clubs and academic sessions (through telephone conferencing), teaching activities and a statistical hotline.
We help fellows navigating the EPIET-currents. After one year for example, our FETP-fellow presented two of her projects on ESCAIDE 2010 and another project at TEPHINET 2010.
Training supervision
The EPIET fellow will be mainly supervised by Florian Burckhardt and Donald Knautz. Florian Burckhardt is a German FETP-fellow of cohort 12 who did his MSc Epidemiology in Edinburgh in 2000 and successfully graduated from EPIET in 2008. Donald Knautz, as a specialist for Medical Microbiology has longstanding experience in infectious disease surveillance and is interim head of LUA Landau. Other supervisors depend on the projects chosen and include senior public health specialists of the LUA.
Language requirements
Working knowledge of German is recommended to communicate with municipal. German language classes can be organized if required.
Training history
Number of EPIET fellows trained at institute: One. New Site 2009!
Number of alumni working at institute: One